The United States rejected any form of global AI governance at the United Nations this week, with President Donald Trump telling the General Assembly on September 22, 2026, that Washington "totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control... artificial intelligence"1,3,9. The following day, the White House reinforced the position at the UN Security Council4.
Trump also announced that official US communications would replace the term "artificial intelligence" with "super intelligence," arguing the word "artificial" undersold the technology. "It sounds much better. It is much better, and it's much more accurate," he said. The rebrand follows a social media poll Trump launched asking followers to choose among "Superior Intelligence," "Extreme Intelligence," and "Supreme Intelligence".
The Security Council session
Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, delivered the US position at a France-initiated Security Council meeting on September 23. "The frontier of intelligence is advancing rapidly. That is not a reason to pause its further development or to constrain it with new global governance structures," Kratsios said. He pointed to the Carolina Principles, agreed by G20 innovation ministers in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, this month, as the preferred framework, emphasizing that countries should retain national control over technology governance.
Kratsios said the US has worked with frontier labs to test new models and has established cybersecurity clearinghouses to coordinate on vulnerabilities. He told the Council that "a prosperous future will not be secured by a global regulator" and that other countries should legislate for their own citizens.
OpenAI head Sam Altman was set to address the Security Council on Wednesday, while Anthropic chief Dario Amodei and Hugging Face Inc. co-founder Clement Delangue were scheduled to participate remotely. Each of the three company heads called for international standards or disclosure rules earlier in the meeting, putting them at odds with Washington's stance.
Competing declarations and diplomatic friction
A declaration adopted Monday by 22 countries stated that AI should remain under human direction, oversight, and control, and proposed stronger international supervision. Neither the United States nor China signed it. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on the US and China to begin dialogue on AI's future, comparing the moment to US-Soviet engagement during the Cold War. "Governments with the greatest AI capabilities have the greatest responsibilities to humanity," Guterres said.
The US and China are currently discussing the creation of a communication channel for AI concerns ahead of a Washington summit between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday.
Trump dismissed AI safety warnings by comparing them to climate change predictions. "The very same people who said we'll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming... are now saying that AI is going to kill us all, that robots are going to attack us, and that everything is going to be a total disaster," he said.
The speech also exposed a rift with Australia. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who has advocated AI guardrails and helped organize the 22-country declaration, posted a selfie with Trump at a UN reception5. But the US embassy in Canberra issued a sharp critique of Australia's proposed Digital Duty of Care legislation, calling it a threat to free expression and fair competition.
ANALYSIS The US position isolates Washington from both allied governments seeking binding safety measures and from the frontier AI companies whose executives used the same Security Council session to advocate international coordination. Kratsios's emphasis on the Carolina Principles and national-level regulation frames the US alternative as voluntary best-practice sharing rather than enforceable oversight.
Dario Amodei has separately called for a more measured pace of frontier AI development, including third-party evaluators and cooperation among AI companies in democratic countries. Sam Altman has also supported pacing frontier development. Trump's address offered no concession to those positions, stating: "Whoever masters the technology first wins".