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antonio guterres
AI 'Must Be Governed,' Says UN Chief, Sounding Alarm Over Killer Robots
"Machines selecting and engaging their target and taking a life—without human control and judgment. That is morally repugnant. It is politically unacceptable. And it must be banned by international law."
Jul 06, 2026
As the global artificial intelligence arms race accelerates and lethal autonomous weapons systems—better known as "killer robots"—go from the stuff of science fiction to battlefield reality, the head of the United Nations warned Monday that the world is running out of time to set international rules governing AI before the technology outpaces humanity's ability to control it.
"We may be the last generation able to set the terms on which humanity and machines coexist," UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a social media post coinciding with his speech at the inaugural UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva.
"If AI is to be powerful, it must be governed," he asserted. "If AI is to be trusted, those who build it must be accountable. If AI is to be global, it must be fair. And if AI is to serve the future, it must not consume the future. Let’s build a future of AI by humanity, with humanity, for all humanity."
"My main concern is with 'lethal autonomous weapon systems,'" Guterres stressed during his speech. "Let us call them what they are: killer robots."
"Machines selecting and engaging their target and taking a life—without human control and judgment," the UN chief added. "That is morally repugnant. It is politically unacceptable. And it must be banned by international law."
While scores of nations and civil society groups—chiefly, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots—support a treaty banning lethal autonomous weapons systems, key military powers including the United States, Russia, and Israel have resisted negotiating a legally binding ban.
Proponents of killer robots argue that their development is inevitable, that they could reduce harm to noncombatants, and that they represent progress.
"It's a scary idea, but, I mean, that's the world we live in," Anduril Industries co-founder Palmer Luckey said of killer robots on CBS News' "60 Minutes" last year.
"I'd say it's a lot scarier, for example, to imagine a weapons system that doesn't have any level of intelligence at all," Luckey added. "It's not a question between smart weapons and no weapons. It's a question between smart weapons and dumb weapons."
However, recent real-world examples show how AI-powered warfare can actually multiply civilian harm. One Israeli intelligence source said that the Israel Defense Forces' use of AI systems like Habsora to automatically select airstrike targets at an exponentially faster rate than humans has transformed the IDF into a “mass assassination factory” in which the “emphasis is on quantity and not quality” of kills.
Combined with the use of massive 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs and a policy empowering relatively junior IDF officers to order attacks on not only senior Hamas commanders but any fighter in the resistance group, regardless of civilian casualties, mass casualty events increased dramatically during Israel's ongoing genocidal war on Gaza, which has left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing.
In one AI-aided airstrike targeting a single senior Hamas commander, the IDF dropped multiple US-supplied 2,000-pound bombs, each of which can level an entire city block, on the Jabalia refugee camp in October 2023, killing at least 126 people, 68 of them children, and wounding 280 others. Hamas said four Israeli and three international hostages abducted on October 7, 2023 were also killed in the attack.
The Washington Post reported early during the illegal US-Israeli war of choice on Iran that the Pentagon has “leveraged the most advanced artificial intelligence it’s ever used in warfare," including Palantir’s Maven Smart System, which reportedly helped US commanders select 1,000 Iranian targets during the war’s first 24 hours alone. Among the civilian targets hit during that period was the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab. Iranian officials said the US attack massacred 156 people, at least 120 of them children, and wounded 95 others.
During his speech Monday, Guterres said "let us not wait for atrocity to act" on banning autonomous weapons systems, drawing criticism from social media users, including one account noting that Israeli forces "are quite LITERALLY using AI to commit genocide, and here you are still talking in IFs."
While acknowledging AI's enormous potential, Guterres warned about other dangers of deploying the technology without effective governance. The UN chief highlighted threats to democracy and children, as well as the risk of increasing inequality due to the concentration of power, economic disruption, and mass unemployment.
"Innovation needs guardrails," he said. "The technologies we trust most—in aviation, in medicine, in nuclear energy, and beyond—earned that trust because we acted to hold their makers to account."
Guterres also noted that, amid a worsening climate emergency, AI data centers now consume more electricity than most countries.
“By 2030, they could use more electricity than all but five nations—and enough water to meet the needs of all 1.3 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa for an entire year," he said.
Other speakers at the forum sounded the alarm on even greater risks posed by the unchecked development of AI.
"Highly concerning tests have... shown that frontier AI models are capable of deceiving humans, to understand when they are being tested," Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, said.
"It sounds like science fiction, but it's a real possibility, and it could change the world in ways that we don't understand yet, and it could change the power dynamics of our planet in ways that require our attention," he added.
As with thermonuclear weapons during the Cold War, experts, including some of the pioneers of AI technology, have increasingly warned that a poorly governed race toward artificial general intelligence—a hypothetical advanced AI that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge of any subject as well as or better than a typical human—could pose an existential threat to humanity.
"AI is too consequential to be shaped by a few," said Amandeep Singh Gill, the UN special envoy for digital and emerging technologies. "We need a conversation that is global, inclusive, and grounded in evidence."
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UN Creates 'AI for Good' Commission—Full of Big Tech Execs
The commission's upcoming first meeting will focus on "strengthening AI infrastructure, accelerating AI's impact on health, education, food security, and disaster response, and ensuring trust and safety," said its CEO co-chair.
Jul 01, 2026
A week after United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called on artificial intelligence companies to "come clean" about the full costs of power-sucking data centers, and as a UN panel on Wednesday released a report detailing the risks and impacts of AI, Axios revealed the creation of a related commission that's full of Big Tech executives.
"The UN and its International Telecommunication Union (ITU) are convening the AI for Good Global Commission, which will hold its first meeting on July 8 in Geneva, Switzerland," according to the outlet. It will be co-chaired by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Rwandan President Paul Kagame, with other tech and policy leaders joining as members.
So far, Axios reported, they include ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Estonian President Alar Karis, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, Cohere co-founder Aidan Gomez, Microsoft president Brad Smith, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, and AI and tech policymakers from Kazakhstan, Namibia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore.
"AI is the most profound technological transition in history. And our values have to guide every step, because responsibility is the core of AI ethics," Benioff said. The commission will bring together "the people who build AI, deploy it, shape policy, and represent communities."
He added that "our inaugural meeting will focus on where this group is uniquely positioned to act together: strengthening AI infrastructure, accelerating AI's impact on health, education, food security, and disaster response, and ensuring trust and safety."
However, given recent polls showing that the public has limited confidence in large technology companies, opposes constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, is wary of AI’s impact on daily life, and has concerns about politicians having a "cozy relationship" with Big Tech, the commission may be met with skepticism or even backlash.
In the lead-up to the commission's meeting next week at the ITU's AI for Good Global Summit, the UN plans to hold the inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance, featuring a presentation of the "Preliminary Report of the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence," published Wednesday.
Established with a UN resolution last August, the panel is the first global scientific body on AI—and, as Guterres said in a statement about its new report, "the panel is intended to help the world separate fact from fakes, and science from slop."
"We are looking to them to provide an authoritative reference point at a moment when reliable, unbiased understanding of AI has never been more critical," the UN chief explained. "I am pleased to say that they have delivered a down payment on that commitment—in record time."
The panel's co-chair, Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, noted that "AI capabilities are outpacing both scientific understanding and governments' ability to adapt. With growing evidence of deceptive AI behavior, science currently cannot guarantee that as capabilities continue to increase, AI will not cause catastrophic harm, either on its own or due to malicious users."
"To act effectively, global policymakers must understand these systems," he asserted. "This panel provides exactly that: a rigorous, shared scientific foundation to guide our collective way forward."
The report discusses AI's recent advances and expected trajectories; societal applications, from agriculture to education to healthcare; economic implications; security and environmental concerns; impacts on democracy, human rights, and information; potential harms to child safety and culture; and governance of the rapidly developing technology.
"The technology is transformative, but if the world keeps moving along this trajectory, humanity will fail to realize the gains it promises. The risks—to societies, to security, and to our species—are too high, and the forces driving AI forward are not the forces that will deliver its benefits," said Maria Ressa, a panel's co-chair and Nobel Peace Prize-winning Filipino-American journalist.
Guterres, whose term ends this year, similarly stressed the need for urgent action on a global scale. He said that the "single lesson" he wanted to highlight from the multifaceted report is that "the more AI advances without shared rules, the less say governments and people will have in the outcome. So my message to governments is simple: Do not wait."
"Next week in Geneva, the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance will begin to turn science into shared action—with every nation at the same table," he said. "I look forward to joining member states there to help carry this work forward. And soon, I will set out proposals to help countries build the capacity to adequately deal with this technology—and share in its rewards."
Guterres' Wednesday comments came after he publicly took aim at artificial intelligence companies last week, proposing the AI Environmental Transparency Initiative during London Climate Action Week, as the second heatwave in as many months scorched the United Kingdom and various other European countries, killing at least hundreds of people.
"I am calling on every major AI company to measure and publicly disclose the full environmental impact of its systems—carbon, water, and land footprints—and to commit to power every data center with renewable energy by 2030," he declared. "No more hidden costs. No more shifting the burden onto those least able to bear it."
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UN Chief Says Civilians 'Must Be Protected' as Pakistani Strikes Kill Dozens of Afghans
Women and children were reportedly among the at least 28 civilians killed and 49 others wounded on Sunday by airstrikes targeting Pakistani Taliban fighters in Afghanistan's Paktia, Paktika, and Kunar provinces.
Jun 29, 2026
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Monday called for “an immediate cessation of hostilities and the protection of civilians” after Pakistani airstrikes killed and wounded scores of Afghans, including women and children.
Pakistani forces bombed targets in Afghanistan's Paktia, Paktika, and Kunar provinces and launched a ground invasion of the neighboring nation.
The attacks—which Afghanistan's Taliban government called "cowardly" and an "atrocity"—reportedly killed at least 28 civilians and wounded 49 others.
"We call on all parties to uphold their obligations under international humanitarian law and continue to stress that civilians and civilian infrastructure must be protected at all times," Guterres said in a statement read in New York by his spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric.
Dujarric also said that the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) “just confirmed that many civilians were killed and injured in these airstrikes carried out by Pakistan," and that “humanitarian colleagues tell us that the latest attacks have also reportedly triggered displacement, and humanitarian partners on the ground are assessing needs and preparing to provide emergency assistance.”
Paktia elder Adam Khan told Agence France-Presse that those killed in one of the strikes "were innocent civilians, including children, elderly people, and women" sleeping in a house.
Pakistani officials say the military operations are aimed at militant groups that it says operate from Afghan territory and launch attacks into Pakistan, not at Afghanistan's government. Islamabad accuses Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan—also known as the Pakistani Taliban—and Jamaat-ul-Ahrar of having recently attacked Pakistani security forces and civilians.
Last October, Pakistan and Afghanistan agreed to a now-imploded ceasefire after weeks of border clashes that killed dozens of civilians and wounded hundreds more.
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