CONFIRMED: the US and China sit together at the Security Council to talk about AI

On Wednesday, September 23, France, which holds the UN Security Council presidency for September, convened a 15 member session on artificial intelligence and international security. The meeting took place during the UN General Assembly high level week in New York and, for the first time in a Council session, brought together frontier labs from the United States and China to address shared risk.

Who was in the room

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended in person. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei joined remotely. DeepSeek was invited and sent representatives, though founder Liang Wenfeng was not expected to appear personally. Moonshot AI, maker of the Kimi model, also joined the session. Rounding out the panel were Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue and Yoshua Bengio, co chair of the UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on AI.

The tension nobody hid

The moment arrived wrapped in political friction. While Altman and Amodei prepared to ask for more international oversight in New York, the US government publicly called that kind of scrutiny a globalist scheme, according to Fortune. The contrast is telling: the very executives running the country's most valuable labs are asking for external checks, while Washington resists any multilateral arrangement that might limit its edge in the technology race.

What was on the agenda

The session covered three recurring fronts in public AI safety debate: misuse by malicious actors in cyberattacks, the risk of increasingly autonomous systems slipping beyond effective control, and the race between countries for frontier capability. The presence of DeepSeek and Moonshot alongside OpenAI and Anthropic signals the Council is trying to treat the issue as a shared problem, not merely a commercial dispute between blocs.

The limits of the gesture

A Security Council briefing produces no law or treaty. None of the companies present made a binding commitment during the meeting, and the format itself, with CEOs from rival labs and rival countries on the same agenda, is more symbolic than operational. For a small or midsize company using AI day to day, the immediate practical effect is zero. The value of the story lies elsewhere: it shows AI safety has become formal foreign policy business, not just lab press releases.

MaxAssistant's read

The most interesting data point is not what was said in the room, it is who agreed to walk into it. Having DeepSeek and Moonshot seated next to OpenAI and Anthropic at a UN session is a sign that AI diplomacy is maturing faster than domestic regulation in several countries, Brazil included. Worth watching whether this kind of meeting becomes routine or stays a one off tied to General Assembly week.

Sources

Fortune, Trump calls AI oversight a globalist scheme as Amodei and Altman head to the UN to ask for it: https://fortune.com/2026/09/23/trump-un-ai-globalist-scheme-altman-amodei-security-council/ | Business Standard, DeepSeek, OpenAI and Anthropic to brief UN Security Council on AI this week: https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/deepseek-openai-and-anthropic-to-brief-un-security-council-on-ai-this-week-126092201553_1.html | The Deep Dive, UN Security Council Brings DeepSeek, Sam Altman To Talk About AI Risks: https://thedeepdive.ca/un-security-council-brings-deepseek-sam-altman-to-talk-about-ai-risks/