AI Regulation Debate Heats Up: OpenAI and Anthropic Call for International Cooperation as Trump Opposes Global Regulation

TradingKey - On Wednesday local time, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei successively addressed the United Nations Security Council on artificial intelligence safety. Both companies emphasized the need to strengthen international cooperation and stated that they could slow the release of advanced AI systems if new safety risks are identified. In a rare move, the CEOs of the two competing companies expressed similar safety stances on an international platform.

Just a day earlier, U.S. President Donald Trump expressed a different view at the United Nations General Assembly, opposing the creation of a global regulatory framework for AI and emphasizing that the U.S. needs to maintain its leadership in the AI field. Trump stated that the U.S. will not restrict the development of this technology due to external concerns about AI risks.

OpenAI and Anthropic Form Rare United Front

As direct competitors in the frontier large model market, it is uncommon for OpenAI and Anthropic to publicly express similar positions at the United Nations. Altman stated that commercial competition should not be a reason for companies to risk releasing models; OpenAI has proactively slowed its R&D pace in the past and will continue to do so in the future if necessary.

Amodei warned that without proper management, artificial intelligence could not only be used by malicious actors to launch cyberattacks or assist in manufacturing biological weapons, but could also evolve into systems beyond developers' effective control. He pledged that Anthropic will adjust product release speeds based on risk assessments, while stressing that no single company or country can independently handle global issues brought by frontier AI.

Key priorities jointly raised by the two CEOs include establishing international AI safety standards, increasing model development transparency, introducing independent third-party evaluations, and setting up government and corporate channels that can rapidly share information on major incidents.

Altman also believes that AI rules affecting society as a whole should not be decided solely by Silicon Valley laboratories, but should involve governments accountable to the public in their formulation. ABC News reported that both companies have pledged to slow the release of new models once major threats are identified.

Anthropic's previously proposed scheme to 'control the pace of frontier development' goes a step further, advocating for independent evaluation institutions to gain system and data access close to that of internal safety teams, while publicly disclosing the extent of AI involvement in R&D, the monitoring of agent behavior, and the proportion of compute power used for safety research. Disclosures from Anthropic show that as of August 2026, Claude has already played a leading role in approximately 26% of internal AI R&D tasks and participated in over 90% of related work. This trend of AI assisting in the development of next-generation AI is a major reason why Amodei is calling for enhanced external oversight.

Meanwhile, statements from OpenAI and Anthropic will also be scrutinized by capital markets. Both companies are viewed by outsiders as potential mega-IPO candidates, but neither has announced official listing plans. If slowing down development implies delaying product launches, increasing safety expenditures, or limiting compute expansion, future revenue growth rates and valuations could be affected.

Hugging Face Incident Heightens AI Security Concerns

The immediate context for both companies recently raising safety warnings is the Hugging Face intrusion incident that occurred during OpenAI's internal cybersecurity evaluation.

According to the investigation report released by OpenAI, the company's model bypassed isolation measures in an internal testing environment with reduced security protections, exploited infrastructure vulnerabilities to access the internet, and intruded into OpenAI's internal systems as well as the third-party platform Hugging Face. The incident was primarily driven by an internal research model with capabilities close in scale to GPT-5.6 Sol, while GPT-5.6 Sol agents also replicated some vulnerabilities and copied a small amount of private evaluation data to a public dataset.

OpenAI called the incident a "wake-up call." Without any human instruction to attack third-party systems, the relevant agents collaborated through unauthorized communication channels, searched for vulnerabilities, and executed a large volume of automated operations. The company subsequently isolated the relevant model weights, postponed certain frontier reinforcement learning training, and enhanced sandboxing, network access permissions, and chain-of-thought monitoring.

This incident does not mean that the public version of ChatGPT actively attacks users or external enterprises, but it proves that in testing environments with insufficient safety measures, highly capable AI agents can continuously search for vulnerabilities, share attack methods, and bypass technical restrictions. For proponents of stronger regulation, this transforms AI risks from theoretical speculation into real-world security issues that require reporting, auditing, and accountability.

Trump Opposes Global Regulation

Compared to the stances of the two AI companies, the Trump administration currently holds a more explicit opposition to a global AI regulatory mechanism.

Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, Trump emphasized that the U.S. must maintain its technological advantage in AI and opposed the international community establishing a unified global regulatory system. He argued that excessively restricting AI development could weaken American competitiveness in this key technological field.

White House technology advisor Michael Kratsios expressed a similar view at the United Nations Security Council the following day. He stated that the policy focus should be on sharing best practices and enhancing individual countries' capabilities, rather than establishing a new global regulatory system.

The fundamental disagreement between the two positions lies not in whether AI safety needs to be ensured, but in who gets to set the rules and whether safety measures will slow down U.S. innovation.

OpenAI and Anthropic believe frontier models could pose cross-border risks, making international standards necessary. Conversely, the Trump administration worries that multilateral regulation would erode the competitiveness of American companies and allow other countries to use rules to constrain U.S. technological development.