UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged governments Monday to adopt global rules for artificial intelligence and warned that its expanding military use and risks to children are advancing faster than international safeguards.
Addressing the inaugural UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva on July 6, Guterres said increasingly powerful AI chips designed for civilian use are shifting to the battlefield, where “killer robots” are already the norm.
He called for a global governance framework that places safety, human rights, and accountability at its core while ensuring that developing countries are not excluded from the benefits of the rapidly evolving technology.
Guterres said any future international agreement on AI must be “worthy of global trust” and prioritize safety, especially for children vulnerable to digitally generated manipulation and abuse.
“AI must never strip away dignity or entrench discrimination. And in every high-stakes decision – in justice, in healthcare, in policing – machines can inform, but humans must decide – and answer,” he said.
The secretary-general also proposed an AI Child Safety Pledge, saying governments and technology companies should require child-specific safety testing before AI systems are made accessible to children.
“No child should be a guinea pig for unregulated AI…We do not let medicine reach a child until it is proven safe. We test every toy; yet AI has reached our children – their learning, their friendships, their most private questions, before anyone asked what it would do to them,” he said.
Under the proposed pledge, AI developers would have to prove their systems are safe for children through independent oversight, prohibit the generation of sexual images of children, and ensure children showing signs of distress are connected with human support.
“When a child shows signs of distress, the system must stop and connect them to real human support,” Guterres said. “When a child is harmed, the answer must never be ‘the algorithm did it.’”
The appeal comes as the United Nations intensifies efforts to establish international governance for AI. The UN’s High-Level Advisory Body on AI called for global oversight in 2023, while the 2024 Pact for the Future and Global Digital Compact provided a mandate for developing an international governance framework.
In June, the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence warned that AI could “cause catastrophic harm, either on its own or due to malicious users,” while the technology is “outpacing both scientific understanding and governments’ ability to adapt.”
Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, said there is no indication that AI development is slowing.
“Highly concerning tests have also shown that frontier AI models are capable of deceiving humans, to understand when they are being tested,” he said.
“It sounds like science fiction, but it’s a real possibility, and it could change the world in ways that we don’t understand yet, and it could change the power dynamics of our planet in ways that require our attention,” Bengio added.
Guterres also warned that unequal access to AI could deepen existing global inequalities. He announced that more than 20 countries have backed a UN-supported Global Network for Exchange and Cooperation on AI Capacity Building to help developing countries strengthen their AI capabilities.
“We cannot allow the digital divide to harden into an AI divide and the AI divide to become a development gap, a security gap, and a sovereignty gap,” he said.
The secretary-general also called on major AI companies to publicly disclose the carbon, water, and land footprint of their systems and commit to powering all AI data centers with renewable energy by 2030.
“AI may feel intangible – but its footprint is not,” he said, noting that data centers already consume more electricity than most countries.
The first UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance is being held alongside the AI for Good Summit in Geneva on July 6-7. A second global dialogue is scheduled for May 2027 in New York.
