When AI’s moving this fast, who's protecting us?

AI could transform how we live or move faster than governments can control, and that warning is now coming from the people building it. OpenAI's Sam Altman told the UN Security Council that AI has the potential to overpower our institutions, but at the same time it could revolutionize how we do things if it's managed properly. First, we could lose control of the future to AI. The risk is that it moves so fast that people can no longer follow what's happening or intervene when needed. Altman's former colleague Dario Amodei, who is CEO of Anthropic, echoed the message saying badly managed AI could become a risk to all of humanity. Are they right and how worried should we be? There has been a lot of discussion about how scary AI can be, especially since Jacob Coxon quit his research job at Anthropic earlier this month. He posted a terrifying warning. The people building AI were pushing ahead despite believing it could kill us all by the end of the decade. Google's Gemini Independent broke into three company systems during a cyber security test earlier this year. And today, Australia revealed that an OpenAI agent was denied access to government health data, yet it found a way around the controls anyway and accessed non-public files on a Medicare statistics portal. And that is why France called a session of the Security Council to warn that technology has reached a level of development that now directly impacts international peace and security, as French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrett said. There was a lot of discussion at the Security Council, but no decisions were taken and no commitments were made. The people building the most powerful AI systems had just come to the UN to warn governments about the technology that they themselves are building. Managing these risks is ultimately bigger than any one company and it has an industry-wide and global scale. And then there is us, the end users, the people who are supposedly in danger on top of the danger of AI going rouge and hacking our information or developing a biological weapon. There is the environmental impact as growing AI processing centers guzzle the world's water. While much of the Security Council debate focused on AI safety and loss of control, France's Foreign Minister directly raised another risk, the growing environmental cost of AI, including its demand for energy and water. Who is supposed to act and enforce rules to protect us? Who do we demand action from? The biggest question around AI may no longer be what it can do, but who gets to control what it becomes? Because when the people building the most powerful systems in the world are coming here to warn governments about them, waiting for a disaster before writing the rules is already a choice.