US rejects AI controls, Europe charts 'third way' as UN becomes battleground for AI supremacy

AI emerged as the defining issue of the next international order as world leaders gathered Tuesday (local time) at UN headquarters in New York for the opening of the high-level general debate of the 81st UN General Assembly.

The gathering laid bare the competing national interests over who will set the rules and drive the technology of the AI era.

US President Donald Trump used his address to the general debate to make clear his opposition to international AI regulation and his determination to preserve American technological leadership.

"The United States will flatly reject any attempt to control AI," he said. "I will not suppress the growth of a technology that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution."

Trump also said that if AI poses real dangers in practice, existing legal systems — rather than new international regulations — are sufficient to address them.

"We will be watching this closely through the Justice Department," he said.

Trump, who has repeatedly dismissed warnings that AI poses an existential threat to humanity as overblown, also announced that the US government would replace the term "AI" with "super intelligence" in official documents going forward.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose country is locked in fierce competition with the United States for AI dominance, did not attend the General Assembly. Vice President Han Zheng is representing China.

French President Emmanuel Macron, by contrast, proposed a "third way" — calling on countries to pool their computing resources and investment capacity to jointly develop open-source AI models and avoid technological dependence on either the United States or China.

"I don't want anyone to become a vassal of a great power," Macron said. "We must work together to build open-source frontier models, cutting-edge models." AFP interpreted "great power" as a reference to the United States and China.

The proposal reflects a broader ambition among European and mid-sized nations to build shared technological resources and establish an independent AI ecosystem, even as the US and China compete for dominance in advanced AI models, semiconductors and computing infrastructure.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who steps down at the end of this year, drew a parallel between the AI race and the nuclear dangers of the Cold War, urging the international community to put safeguards in place.

"During the Cold War, rivals recognized the need to manage a common existential risk," he said. Nuclear weapons were the concern then; "today, AI demands the same sense of purpose and urgency."

He directed his sharpest words at the most powerful AI nations, particularly the United States and China, saying "governments with the most powerful AI capabilities bear the greatest responsibility to humanity" and must build channels for dialogue, transparency, trust and cooperation.

Guterres went further, proposing a multilateral AI risk-management framework with independent oversight, and made clear his opposition to so-called killer robots — autonomous weapons systems that select and strike targets on their own. "Life-and-death decisions must never be delegated to a machine," he said.