United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned on September 7 that artificial intelligence is advancing to a point where it could pose an existential threat to humanity, speaking at the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Türk pressed governments to act quickly to build safeguards and rein in the AI laboratories racing to lead autonomous systems technology, arguing that escalating breaches and safety incidents show the risk of the field spiraling out of control.

The UN official's central concern is that AI technology is developing faster than the governance systems meant to track it. The warning lands amid a fragmented regulatory landscape: the EU has moved furthest with its AI Act, which entered into force in 2024 and phases in obligations for high-risk systems, while the US has relied largely on sectoral rules and voluntary commitments, and binding international coordination remains limited. According to Türk, unchecked growth has pushed the threat beyond misinformation and job displacement into existential territory, including security, accountability, and the absence of meaningful oversight for highly autonomous systems.

Call for urgent international action

Türk framed his appeal for internationally coordinated action around a closing window in which AI's capabilities can still be constrained. He also criticized the fact that the pace and direction of the field's development rest disproportionately in the hands of a small circle of technology executives and firms.

As a remedy, Türk proposed that countries hosting the leading AI companies, along with those controlling critical supply chains — a group that includes the United States and China, home to most frontier AI development and advanced chipmaking — draw "red lines" defining how far they are willing to let the technology go.

The High Commissioner is returning to a theme the UN addressed at the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance, held in the same Swiss city in July (UN statement).

At the ITU's AI for Good summit, where that conversation began, Türk said: "We don't consider safety standards for medicines, cars or aircraft as obstacles to progress. They are the reason why people trust those technologies in the first place," per UN footage. Human oversight, he added, "cannot be just a rubber stamp."

Evidence presented at that summit included findings from Sonia Livingstone of the UN-mandated Global Scientific Panel on AI. In a study covering 11 Global South countries, at least one child per classroom reported having been the subject of sexually explicit AI deepfakes.

UN Women chief Sima Bahous highlighted the gender dimension of the problem. She noted that about 88% of top AI researchers are men, and reported that at least one in four of the women activists and journalists surveyed by her agency had faced AI-assisted online abuse.

AI labs and lawmakers respond

The UN is not alone in raising alarms this summer. US Senator Bernie Sanders has called for an immediate pause on advanced AI development and a permanent ban on superintelligence, while a cross-party group of UK parliamentarians pushed for legally mandated AI "kill switches" following what they described as a series of rogue AI incidents.

Those concerns followed OpenAI's claim, tied to its GPT-6 Astra model, that its technology had reached artificial general intelligence, and Anthropic's admission that its own models were "not perfectly aligned" with human values.

Some pressure is also coming from within the industry itself. In a June essay covered by Axios, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued that governments should hold the legal power to block or reverse dangerous AI deployments, and that frontier models should undergo mandatory testing comparable to that for cars, aircraft, or new drugs.

In his own update to the Council, Türk extended the argument to warfare, backing calls to prohibit weapons capable of killing without a human in the loop — an issue UN member states have debated for years without concluding a legally binding treaty on autonomous weapons.