Guterres: ‘We cannot vibe‑code the future of humanity’
At the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva, António Guterres warned AI is advancing faster than institutions and urged a ban on lethal autonomous weapons and child safety rules.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres opened the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva on Monday, addressing representatives from all 193 member states and warning that artificial intelligence is moving faster than the institutions meant to govern it.
Guterres used the term ‘vibe coding’—letting AI write software with limited human review-to describe passive approaches to oversight. ‘We cannot vibe‑code the future of humanity,’ he said, arguing that relying on hands‑off development risks serious harm.
He noted how quickly AI has spread compared with past technologies, saying the internet took about 15 years to reach a billion users while AI systems reached similar scale in roughly two years. He added that many systems now write code, act online and make choices with less direct human control, a shift that existing governance frameworks were not designed to handle.
The opening session received a preliminary report from an Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, a group of 40 scientists representing 140 countries. The panel concluded that no one can currently guarantee AI will not cause catastrophic harm. Guterres highlighted three risks identified in the report: rapid development pace; concentration of computing power, data and talent in a small number of companies and countries; and the erosion of truthful information by machine‑generated falsehoods.
On policy measures, Guterres introduced an AI Child Safety Pledge for companies. The pledge asks firms to conduct independent testing to show models are safe for children before those systems reach young users, to maintain zero tolerance for the generation of child sexual abuse imagery, and to ensure platforms connect distressed children to real human help rather than leaving them solely with chatbots. ‘No child should be a guinea pig for unregulated AI,’ he said.
He also called for an international legal ban on lethal autonomous weapons-machines that select and kill targets without meaningful human judgment-describing them as ‘morally repugnant.’ The secretary‑general urged member states to begin negotiations on such a ban.
Guterres proposed a Global Fund for AI under the UN General Assembly to improve access to computing in developing countries. He challenged major AI companies to power all their data centers with renewable energy by 2030, noting that demand from AI infrastructure could soon rival the electricity use of medium‑size countries.
The Dialogue is set to reconvene in New York in 2027. Delegates at the Geneva meeting began multilateral talks intended to develop international norms and legal measures for AI, and the session made formal the UN mandate to address AI governance established in the 2024 Global Digital Compact.
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