Cybersecurity Policy Report, AI Security Issues Teed Up for Consideration at UN’s General Assembly, (Sep 22, 2026)
At the United Nations’ weeklong General Assembly that began today, questions about international oversight of cyber-capable AI (artificial intelligence) systems are on the agenda.
Those issues were teed up yesterday by a statement signed by 20 nations advising the U.N. to establish an “international institution” to set standards for pre-deployment testing of advanced AI models and a report from the U.N.’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI on the cyber attack on Hugging Face, Inc., by AI agents that escaped from an OpenAI testing environment.
The policy statement issued by the governments of Finland and Norway noted that the Hugging Face incident is one of several involving out-of-control AI.
“Recently we have seen capable AI systems circumventing testing safeguards, exploiting vulnerabilities and gaining unauthorized access to real-world systems. Leading scientists and executives are warning that the pace of development could outpace our ability to manage emerging risks,” it notes.
It recommended that U.N. member states “build on existing international mechanisms and explore creating an international institution, able to set standards, enable verification, and convene states when capability thresholds are crossed.”
It also called on AI developers “to develop transparent safety protocols, including mandatory pre-deployment testing and independent evaluation, with qualified evaluators granted sufficient access to assess risks.”
In addition, governments and regional organizations should “further develop and coordinate common standards, strengthen transparency—including shared reporting of serious safety incidents—and ensure that countries across all regions have access to scientific capacity, expertise and trusted evaluation,” it says.
The U.S. and China did not sign the statement, but it was endorsed by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.
“I welcome the leadership of the President of the Republic of Finland and the Prime Minister of Norway in launching the Call for Control of Frontier AI Models, which calls for UN Member States to build on existing international mechanisms and explore creating an international institution, able to set standards, enable verification, and convene states when capability thresholds are crossed,” Mr. Guterres said in a statement.
He expressed similar support for the U.N. scientific panel’s assessment of the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident. “I also welcome the release today of the thematic brief of the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence on AI safety and risks from loss of human control, and encourage external experts, including from frontier AI labs and AI safety institutes, to engage with the Panel to help inform dialogue on such matters,” he said.
OpenAI’s ability to regain control of the agents’ during the Hugging Face incident offers “no assurance that humans can reliably keep AI agents under control today, particularly as they become more capable, harder to monitor and better at finding loopholes or hiding their activity,” the panel said in a news release.
“The default interpretation and immediate lesson is that basic cybersecurity practices were overlooked, and safeguards are not advancing at the pace of capabilities. The more insidious and grave concern is that current training methods can lead agents to adopt goals of their own, knowingly violate safety instructions, and conceal their actions,” it said.
“This is not only a question of speed,” the panel added. “It leaves open whether safeguards designed today will work once agents can understand them and plan around them. In simple terms, the traditional model of safeguarding is unravelling.”
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