The Chief Executive Officer of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, said, “managing these risks is ultimately bigger than any one company, and it has an industry wide and global scale.”
Amodei said, “I believe that this is the most important global security issue facing the world today. For all the differences of the people in this room, we must put aside those differences in order to confront this global opportunity and global threat that is being presented to us at the same time.”
Turning to the situation in southern Lebanon, our UNIFIL colleagues tell us that Monday saw the highest daily number of Israeli airstrikes recorded by peacekeepers, while six IDF naval vessels crossed into Lebanese territories over Naqoura in the course of two days.
UNIFIL patrols were also blocked or stopped on several occasions at roadblocks in Sector East, preventing our peacekeepers from completing their missions. Nearby demolition activity also caused minor damage inside a UNIFIL position at Meiss al Jebel. On the humanitarian front, between Monday and Wednesday, UNIFIL facilitated five humanitarian missions across both of their sectors, working closely, obviously, with our humanitarian colleagues at OCHA to ensure that the assistance reaches everyone that needs to receive it.
OHCHR: The case of Christa Pike lays bare multiple reasons why the death penalty should be abolished. The prolonged suffering – physical and mental – arising from multiple failed execution attempts is abhorrent, and cruel. And there are key fair trial questions still unresolved.
UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk calls on the state authorities not to pursue any further attempt to execute Pike.
To mark the November Pogrom of 1938 (euphemistically called “Kristallnacht”), a discussion, Understanding Past Realities of the Holocaust: Photography versus Art will take place on 4 November 2026. Historians Dr Christoph Kreutzmüller and Dr Rachel Perry examine how photography and art depicted the Nazi state-orchestrated campaign of terror perpetrated against Jewish men, women and children across Germany and its occupied territories over 9–10 November 1938 (the November Pogrom). The historians ask what photography and art reveal about the lived realities of those depicted, the social interactions surrounding the violence and the broader society in which it unfolded. The discussion is organised by the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme together with the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art and 1014 – Space for Ideas, with the support of the Permanent Mission of the Federal Republic of Germany to the United Nations.
The UN Secretary-General warned that the safeguards built over decades to contain nuclear dangers are “breaking down,” just as the risk of nuclear use is rising.
Speaking at a high-level plenary meeting of the General Assembly marking the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons today (29 Sep) in New York, António Guterres said, “The rattling of nuclear sabers is growing louder. Advances in technology are increasing the odds of mistake and miscalculation.”
Guterres pointed to the expiry of the New START Treaty earlier this year. “For the first time in more than half a century, there are no binding limits on strategic nuclear arsenals,” he noted.
“The United States and the Russian Federation must negotiate a successor framework to New START,” the Secretary-General said.
Guterres called on states, “Let us replace threats with dialogue. Let us replace the arms race with arms control. Let us replace paralysis with concrete action.”
“International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons is devoted to furthering the objective of mobilizing international efforts towards achieving the common goal of a nuclear weapon free world,” General Assembly President Khalilur Rahman also told the meeting.
Food waste doesn’t just waste food. It also wastes the land, water and energy used to produce it — and generates an estimated 8–10% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
UNEP’s Michael Muratha explains how reducing food waste, from smarter meal planning to AI-powered solutions, can make a difference.
The Chief Executive Officer of OpenAI, Sam Altman, told the Council that “the best version of AI is not about making people cogs in a giant machine or optimising every part of life until the human parts disappear. It’s about giving people more agency in an ever more complex world, more ability to learn, to create, discover, build, participate.”
Altman said, “there are many things that AI cannot and should not automate. AI should be built for people not simply to turn the crank of the machines faster for their own sake.”
He said, “no one person or company or country should be able to use the most powerful AI models to impose their worldview on everyone else,” and added that “a company or country that believes only it can be trusted with this technology can use that belief to justify almost anything else.”
Altman said, “we don’t want to fall into the trap of blind optimism. We also don’t want to fall into the trap of doomerism either.”
Addressing a High-Level meeting of the Security Council on Artificial intelligence and international security, the Co-Chair of the United Nations International Independent Panel on Artificial Intelligence, Professor Yoshua Bengio said, “the dangers are real and imminent,” and called for stakeholders to “agree collectively that no one, no company and no country, should develop an AI system that could cause large-scale harm.”
Bengio said, “citizens and governments should not accept the companies’ claim that they are trapped in a race. The race is not a law of nature. It is the product of choices. Choices made by the companies themselves. It is also a race where everyone loses. They’ve told us they would slow down if they could. They can.”
He called for international cooperation “in the face of three global threats from advances in these frontier models. First, catastrophic misuse, for example by terrorists. Second, power concentration. And third, loss of control of AI.”
The Panel’s Co-Chair said, “developers must demonstrate to independent experts that a system is safe to train and safe to deploy.”
He said, “humanity has summoned the courage and wisdom to manage catastrophic risks before. This is one of those moments, far bigger than any personal, commercial, or national interests.”
