WASHINGTON, DC—The warnings about the safety of frontier AI models continue to grow louder. Writing in Time in early October, the former chief scientist of the United Kingdom’s AI Security Institute put the probability of us all dying because of smarter-than-human AI systems at 50%. On the same day, a senior OpenAI employee announced that he had left the company because of its “broken” safety culture. But the United States has shown no interest in regulating the technology, except for a “morally binding” voluntary accord recently signed by tech CEOs and US President Donald Trump.
This raises the question of who could govern frontier AI development. A group of middle powers displayed a willingness to do so at the United Nations General Assembly in September, fresh off the news that OpenAI agents had escaped their testing environment and hacked into Hugging Face and Australia’s national health-care database. Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre launched A Call for Control of Frontier AI Models, which has been endorsed by more than 30 political leaders and calls for more coordination and the creation of an international AI agency.