The US told the UN Security Council it wants no international rulebook for advanced AI, arguing regulation should stay a national matter.
Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, delivered the US statement in New York today. He spoke after four briefers from science and industry addressed the council. The core message: Washington sees AI oversight as a job for individual governments, not a multilateral body.
This matters because it forecloses, at least for now, any UN-brokered framework similar to what exists for nuclear nonproliferation or climate. A patchwork of national rules is a very different world for AI labs and their customers than one set of global norms - it means more compliance overhead for companies operating across borders, and less leverage for smaller countries trying to shape how the technology gets built.
Every major push for global tech governance eventually runs into the same wall: the countries with the most powerful AI labs have the least incentive to let anyone else write the rules.