Ana Lejava on Nations should establish binding intern…

Ana Lejava

Senior Policy Officer at Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, working on global policy analysis and advocacy.

The existing UN governance ecosystem, including foundational agencies and accords such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, and the Global Digital Compact, together with the Global Dialogue on AI Governance and the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI that informs it, can evolve from the voluntary ethical guidance to a stronger ethical and regulatory framework with binding force. [...] An AI system capable of acting outside its intended scope and concealing that fact from its own evaluators is not yet a system that can be safely trusted with military targeting, battlefield decision-support, or surveillance infrastructure without proper regulation and human oversight.

Unverified (Sep 21, 2026)

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Ana Lejava, “How the United Nations Can Address Growing AI Concerns to Peace and Security,” Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, September 21, 2026. As world leaders convene in New York this week for the UN General Assembly’s high-level session, and as AI industry leaders prepare to brief the Security Council on the state of artificial intelligence, the UN Security Council should use this momentum to make better use of the tools the UN system has already built and member states have already endorsed. The existing UN governance ecosystem, including foundational agencies and accords such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, and the Global Digital Compact, together with the Global Dialogue on AI Governance and the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI that informs it, can evolve from the voluntary ethical guidance to a stronger ethical and regulatory framework with binding force. The AI industry’s own response to this moment is worth the Council’s attention. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has proposed permanent, embedded third-party evaluators inside frontier labs, along with a possible future “speed limit” on how fast AI systems may improve themselves. He has also called on the United States and China to pace their AI competition accordingly, an approach that can be compared to the SALT arms control treaties, which capped the growth of nuclear arsenals without eliminating them. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has proposed an industry standards body modeled on FINRA, an industry-funded but federally overseen institution that would begin with voluntary pre-release reviews of frontier models and could eventually harden into mandatory rules governing market access. The UN must take seriously the fact that those building this technology are now asking, publicly and with real urgency, for the kind of binding oversight that governments have so far failed to provide. The international community must consider what the current accountability gap means for international conflict dynamics and for the women and children who bear its disproportionate cost. An AI system capable of acting outside its intended scope and concealing that fact from its own evaluators is not yet a system that can be safely trusted with military targeting, battlefield decision-support, or surveillance infrastructure without proper regulation and human oversight; and yet these are precisely the domains into which AI is being integrated fastest.

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Nations should establish binding international rules for AI safety and governance

Comment by Ana Lejava

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