The stalled US war with Iran, the global economic fallout from the conflict and the rapidly evolving risks of artificial intelligence are expected to dominate discussions at the United Nations on Wednesday.
Industry leaders including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue are scheduled to brief the 15-member UN Security Council on the growing concerns surrounding artificial intelligence.
The meeting comes amid increasing warnings about the potential risks of increasingly autonomous AI systems and calls for greater safeguards around the technology.
Hugging Face, an online repository for AI models, was recently targeted in a cyberattack involving autonomous software linked to OpenAI, adding to concerns over the pace of AI development.
Meanwhile, the UN General Assembly’s annual high-level debate is continuing against the backdrop of the escalating conflict between the United States and Iran.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian arrived late Tuesday and is expected to address the General Assembly, marking his first appearance at the world body since the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran.
The strikes in late February triggered a wider conflict across the Middle East, with the administration of US President Donald Trump yet to reach an agreement with Tehran to end the war.
Iran’s retaliation included the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, a major global energy route, contributing to a sharp rise in international oil prices.
Concerns over global trade have also increased following the Houthi takeover of Yemen’s Red Sea coast, which has heightened fears about shipping through the strategic Bab al-Mandab Strait.
Pezeshkian’s address comes a day after Trump threatened to “annihilate the Islamic Republic” and “drive them into hell” during his speech to the UN General Assembly.
Trump, however, also disclosed that negotiations between Washington and Tehran had resumed after months of little diplomatic contact.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner on the sidelines of the UN gathering.
According to Iranian state news agency IRIB, Araghchi said Tehran was demanding the immediate lifting of the US naval blockade, the release of frozen Iranian assets and an end to the war on what Iran describes as resistance fronts.
Elsewhere, Russia’s war against Ukraine is also expected to feature prominently in Wednesday’s diplomatic engagements.
A UN Security Council meeting on Ukraine is scheduled for 11:00 am, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is due to address the General Assembly.
Following his meeting with Trump on Tuesday, Zelensky said Washington and Kyiv wanted the war with Russia to end “before winter.”
He also said he was prepared to stop Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy infrastructure if Moscow agreed to take the same step.
Artificial intelligence also featured prominently in Trump’s UN speech, where he rejected calls for international regulation of the technology.
Trump described efforts to establish global AI rules as a “globalist scheme” and compared current warnings about AI to earlier predictions about climate change.
French President Emmanuel Macron, however, used his address to call for greater independence in AI development.
Macron proposed the creation of an open-source frontier AI model that would not depend on either the United States or China.
“I don’t want anyone to become the vassal of one of the great powers,” he said, calling for countries to work together to develop an advanced open-source model.