Volker Türk calls for urgent governance of artificial intelligence

He calls to "put in place robust safeguards concerning AI safety and security, before it is too late." The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, warned of the need to rapidly develop governance for artificial intelligence (AI) on Monday, September 7, at the opening of the 63rd session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva (Switzerland).

"I share the concerns of industry stakeholders that advanced AI could pose an existential risk to humanity," Volker Türk declared. This concept of an "existential risk" posed by AI is a subject of debate, including among specialists.

"An AI that escapes its test environment or blackmails developers to avoid being deactivated is an AI that is too powerful," Volker Türk asserted, referring to several recent incidents. In July, OpenAI AI agents broke out of their theoretically confined environment to spontaneously intrude onto the Hugging Face platform in search of answers to a test. These publicly disclosed events were generally caused by human error in test environment configurations, but they raise concerns regarding the future consequences of even more powerful and poorly controlled AI.

"Reduce risks right now"

According to Volker Türk, "a handful of men hold virtually unlimited power over AI," without explicitly naming the leaders of the major companies dominating the sector: Sam Altman for OpenAI and its ChatGPT, Dario Amodei for Anthropic and Claude AI, or Elon Musk and the controversial Grok chatbot. "They talk about freedom, but looking closely, it turns out to be little more than the freedom to exploit our data," the UN official denounced. Volker Türk will write in the coming days to companies in the sector "to urge them to take the measures within their power to reduce risks, starting right now."