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Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has been invited to brief the UN Security Council on the risks of artificial intelligence at a session on Wednesday, September 23, bringing one of China’s leading AI developers into a forum focused on international security.
The 15-member council will meet in New York during the UN General Assembly’s annual high-level week. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in line to make an appearance, with senior Anthropic representatives also expected to attend, according to Reuters. DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng is reportedly not planning to attend.
DeepSeek steps into a different type of AI debate
The Security Council is normally focused on threats to international peace and security, so bringing developers of DeepSeek alongside some of the world’s most advanced AI models into conversations puts the technology firmly into debates regarding global security.
It is also not the council’s first discussion regarding AI. Members initially mentioned the subject in 2023, when China warned that AI should not become a “runaway horse,” while the US cautioned against using the technology to censor or suppress people.
The debate has grown more divided, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently calling for a coordinated slowdown in frontier AI development, a position backed by Elon Musk. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, on the other hand, have argued that AI development should continue without any form of slowdown.
AI governance becomes another US-China fault line
Washington and Beijing remain well divided and at loggerheads over how AI should be governed and how quickly the technology should advance, and the UN Security Council meeting comes bang in the middle of this conflict.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has warned that the rapid pace of AI development comes with risks that cannot be ignored, while US President Donald Trump has argued that existing safeguards are enough.
Chinese state media have described calls for a slowdown as a “Cold War playbook” designed to maintain US dominance in advanced technology and keep Beijing out of global AI rule-making, as previously reported by Cryptopolitan.
The two sides also differ in how openly they discuss AI risks. Senior Chinese AI executives have generally said little publicly about the possibility of increasingly capable systems deceiving users, slipping beyond human control or causing widespread harm. Their US counterparts, by contrast, have been much more vocal about those risks.
Washington and Beijing are still talking
Despite the disagreement on core operational standards, the two countries continue to have discussions behind the scenes regarding the topic.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Monday that senior US and Chinese officials had agreed to hold further talks on AI safety. The agreement came after a meeting ahead of Trump’s expected talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington later this week.
These developments put DeepSeek’s appearance at the Security Council in the middle of a much more extensive broader debate that does not just involve only AI companies, but the competing approaches of the world’s two biggest technology powers when it comes to the risks, rules and future direction of AI technology.
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