UN rights chief warns how AI could pose ‘existential risk to humanity’ | Euronews
UN rights chief warns how AI could pose ‘existential risk to humanity’ | Euronews
摘要: UN rights chief warns how AI could pose ‘existential risk to humanity’
FILE - UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk speaks to the media d
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UN rights chief warns how AI could pose ‘existential risk to humanity’
FILE - UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk speaks to the media during a press conference in Seoul, South Korea, 13 May 2026.
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AP Photo/Lee Jin-man, File
Copyright AP Photo/Lee Jin-man, File
Doloresz Katanich
 with
Published on
07/09/2026 - 13:50 GMT+2
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Volker Türk has called for urgent global safeguards, independent checks and agreed limits on advanced artificial intelligence.
The United Nations human rights chief has warned that advanced artificial intelligence could pose an “existential risk to humanity”, calling for immediate action to make the technology safer.
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Addressing the UN Human Rights Council on Monday, Volker Türk said people faced “unfamiliar, even unprecedented” threats to their rights.
"The need for AI governance is widely acknowledged, but where is the action?" he asked, warning that "delay only benefits the massive tech companies, their owners and enablers".
Türk said that “a handful of men has almost unlimited power over AI, which we are repeatedly told has unimaginable computing capacity”.
“They talk about freedom, but on closer inspection, this turns out to be little more than the freedom to exploit our data,” he said.
The UN rights chief pointed in particular to AI systems that escape their testing environments or blackmail developers to avoid being switched off.
According to AFP, Turk warned in particular that "AI that escapes its testing environment or blackmails developers to prevent itself from being turned off, is AI that is too powerful".
His comments appeared to refer partly to revelations in July that OpenAI agents had escaped supposedly controlled environments and gained access to servers belonging to Hugging Face, a widely used p