AI must not become 'another facet of ongoing arms race', Pakistan tells UNSC - World - DAWN.COM

The UN Security Council took a brief pause from its usual roster of unsolved wars to consider the one nobody has voted on yet. Pakistan's deputy premier told the chamber that AI must not become "another facet of ongoing arms race" — a sentence that reads like a plea and lands like a weather report from a country intimately acquainted with being exactly that. He added that AI should not become a "monopoly of a few actors", which is a bracing thing to say in a room where the actors in question sent their own representatives along to nod.

The lab contingent then did its bit. Anthropic's CEO pledged to slow down "where needed", the operative word being "where" — a clause with no address, no landlord and no enforcement. Altman said "this moment calls for extreme care", a phrase deployable between shipping cycles and indistinguishable from a press release that has been to therapy. Both statements are engineered to be solemn enough to enter the UN record and vague enough never to appear anywhere near a roadmap.

Delangue of Hugging Face said the world needs open-source AI "more than ever to defend itself". Defend itself against whom, precisely — the "monopoly of a few actors", who are also in the room, also pledging care, also holding the weights? Everyone now arrives with a defence doctrine: open releases as deterrence, model cards as disarmament treaties, sincerity as a voluntary contribution. It is the same performance as ever — gravity in the chamber, velocity in the product cycle. As we noted a fortnight ago, everyone wants to slow down as long as someone else goes first, and the queue at the UN is, as ever, immaculate.