UN Chief Warns AI Outpacing Governance, Humanity Conducting Unplanned Experiment
Geneva – United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres opened the inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva on Monday, warning representatives from 193 nations that artificial intelligence is advancing at a pace that has already outstripped the institutions designed to regulate it. He characterized humanity’s current approach to AI as an experiment “without a plan, and without consent.”
“Artificial intelligence is advancing at runaway speed,” Guterres stated in his keynote address. “A technology that can reshape economies, transform the world of work, sway elections, and tilt the balance of security is being deployed faster than anyone—including the people building it—can keep up.”
The gathering in Geneva brought together all 193 UN member states for the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance, a multilateral effort to establish oversight for a technology that has rapidly surpassed existing regulatory frameworks.
Guterres employed the concept of “vibe coding” to illustrate the risks of ungoverned AI. This term, coined by Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla, describes programming by intuition—instructing an AI on desired outcomes and allowing it to handle the execution without close scrutiny. Merriam-Webster recently added the term to its dictionary.
While acknowledging that “vibe coding can do wonders” as public trust in AI-generated products grows, Guterres emphasized, “We cannot vibe-code the truth. We cannot vibe-code the future of humanity.”
The urgency of his message was underscored by stark statistics. Guterres noted that it took the internet 15 years to reach one billion users, while AI achieved the same milestone in just two years. He described current AI systems as “no longer tools awaiting instruction—they are writing code, acting online, and making choices with less and less human oversight.”
“Our institutions were built to govern machines that follow commands,” he asserted. “They are not ready for machines that decide.”
The dialogue itself stems from the 2024 Global Digital Compact, which for the first time established international AI governance as a UN mandate. The opening session also received the preliminary report of the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, comprising 40 scientists from 140 countries. Last week, the panel published findings indicating that no one can currently guarantee that AI will not cause catastrophic harm.
Speed was one of three critical warnings Guterres highlighted from the panel’s report. The second was power, referring to the concentration of computing resources, data, and talent within a small number of companies and countries, leaving much of the world excluded from decisions that are already shaping their future. This concentration of power is a concern shared by other AI experts, including Yann LeCun, Andy Kowinski, and Yoshua Bengio.
The third warning concerned truth, as machine-generated falsehoods can now be as persuasive as verified facts, steadily eroding what Guterres termed “the integrity of our information ecosystem.”
Child Safety and Autonomous Weapons
Among Guterres’ concrete proposals is an AI Child Safety Pledge. This would require companies to demonstrate AI safety through independent testing before any AI product is made available to children. It also mandates zero tolerance for the generation of child sexual abuse imagery and calls for distressed children to be connected to human support rather than being left with chatbots. “No child should be a guinea pig for unregulated AI,” he declared.
Furthermore, Guterres addressed the issue of “killer robots.” He described lethal autonomous weapons—machines capable of selecting and engaging targets without human judgment—as “morally repugnant” and called for an international legal ban.
He stressed that states are already engaged in discussions on these matters and urged them not to delay action.
The Global Dialogue on AI Governance is scheduled to reconvene in New York in 2027. Guterres also called on the General Assembly to establish a Global Fund for AI, specifically aimed at improving computing access for developing countries. He further challenged every major AI company to power all their data centers with renewable energy by 2030, estimating that by that year, these facilities will consume more electricity than all but five nations combined.
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