Chinese AI startup DeepSeek will be among the companies briefing the United Nations Security Council this week on the risks posed by artificial intelligence, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as world leaders gather in New York for the annual UN General Assembly.
The 15-member Security Council is set to meet on September 23 to discuss AI and international security — weeks after several AI industry leaders called for a coordinated slowdown of the development of increasingly powerful AI systems, warning that they could soon improve on their own and slip beyond human control. For more context on this story, see our ongoing AI industry coverage.
Who Will Be in the Room
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman plans to brief the meeting, where diplomats also expect participation from senior representatives of Anthropic, Reuters reported last week.
On the Chinese side, DeepSeek and other Chinese AI firms, including Moonshot, have been invited to make statements, one of the sources said. DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng does not plan to attend, the source cautioned, noting that plans remain fluid and could change at the last minute. DeepSeek and Moonshot did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The session lands during a week when New York is already crowded with AI diplomacy, as world leaders gather for the annual UN General Assembly and side meetings multiply around it. That timing cuts both ways for DeepSeek: the council's imprimatur signals that China's leading labs are now treated as indispensable voices on frontier-AI risk, even as Beijing's official position continues to reject the slowdown rhetoric emerging from Silicon Valley.
The unusual lineup — America's most prominent AI executive sharing a Security Council agenda with China's best-known open-weight lab — makes Wednesday's session the most consequential AI meeting the council has held since it first took up the subject.
From 'Runaway Horse' to Rogue AI
The UN Security Council, which is charged with maintaining international peace and security, met for the first time on the risks of AI in 2023. Even then, the fault lines were visible: China warned the technology should not become a "runaway horse," while the United States warned against its use to censor or repress people.
Three years later, the debate has shifted from hypotheticals to incident reports. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned world leaders last week that rapidly advancing AI poses risks that cannot be ignored, putting him at odds with US President Donald Trump, who has argued existing safeguards are sufficient and that China would benefit from doubt being cast on AI development.
Beijing's Public Silence on Catastrophic Risk
One of the more pointed observations in the Reuters reporting concerns what Chinese lab leaders have not said. Unlike the heads of US frontier labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic, the leaders of China's top model developers have rarely publicly articulated the possibility that increasingly capable AI systems could deceive humans, evade control, or cause catastrophic harm — and they have remained largely silent on those risks since the debate intensified in the United States in September.
Chinese state media, for their part, have dismissed calls for a slowdown in AI development as stemming from a "Cold War playbook" — an effort, in Beijing's telling, aimed at preserving Washington's dominance in cutting-edge technology and excluding Beijing from the global AI governance system entirely.
DeepSeek's appearance at the council therefore carries a double significance: it is simultaneously Beijing's most visible engagement yet with the global AI-risk conversation and a test of whether Chinese labs will engage with the catastrophic-risk framing at all.
Talks Ahead of Trump-Xi
The Security Council session does not stand alone. Senior US and Chinese officials agreed to hold further talks on AI safety, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on September 21, after meeting ahead of Trump's scheduled talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping later this week in Washington.
That sequencing — a high-stakes summit in Washington running parallel to a Security Council debate in New York — underscores how thoroughly AI has moved from a technical policy file to the center of the bilateral relationship.
What to Watch
Three questions hang over Wednesday's meeting. Whether Liang Wenfeng changes his mind and attends. Whether DeepSeek's statement engages the deck-of-cards risks — deception, loss of control — that its American counterparts emphasize, or stays on safer ground of equitable access and development rights. And whether the council can produce anything beyond familiar positions.
The council's record on AI is thin: a first meeting in 2023, a secretary-general's warning this month, and no binding framework. But as a stage for the emerging US-China argument over who sets the rules for frontier AI — and whose fears get taken seriously — it has few rivals.
---
Stay Ahead of AIGet the latest AI news, analysis, and breakthroughs — all in one place.
Read more AI news →
