Sam Altman is calling for a US-led international forum to set global safety standards for artificial intelligence, arguing that no single country should be left to dominate the technology.

In an op-ed published Wednesday in the Financial Times, OpenAI Group PBC’s chief executive (pictured) proposed “a US-led international forum that establishes accepted standards, provides expert and impartial analysis of capabilities and risks and makes the technology available to nations and companies that participate and follow the rules.”

The body would bring together government representatives, independent technical experts and others, Altman wrote. He said it could “serve as a governance mechanism over the labs and guard against the commercial pressures that can lead to unsafe racing.”

Altman pointed to global aviation safety rules, international financial standards and the International Atomic Energy Agency as models. The IAEA was set up in 1957 to police civilian nuclear energy and did so even as the U.S. and Soviet Union built up their arsenals. Altman’s argument is that rival powers have found ways to govern dangerous technologies together.

He framed the plan partly as a way to spread the benefits of AI beyond a handful of companies. “Everyone on Earth should benefit from this technology and determine for themselves how best to use it,” he wrote.

The proposal follows a Group of Seven summit in France at which executives from OpenAI, Anthropic PBC and Google DeepMind met world leaders and discussed setting common standards for advanced AI models. The idea of an international forum was attributed to Altman at those talks.

Enforcement is the open question. Unlike aircraft and nuclear enrichment plants, which inspectors can physically examine, frontier models are trained inside data centers with little outside visibility. That opacity makes it far harder to verify whether a lab is following any agreed set of rules or racing ahead in secret.

Altman is not alone in pushing for oversight. OpenAI and Anthropic have both previously backed the idea of an international AI watchdog. Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei has argued for rules closer to those of the Federal Aviation Administration, a more prescriptive model than the standards-setting body Altman describes.

The pitch also comes as Washington tightens its grip on the industry. OpenAI has agreed to roll out its coming GPT-5.6 models first to a group of government-approved partners. Anthropic was briefly forced to pull its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models last month after a Commerce Department order restricting foreign access, then restored Fable 5 this week.

Whether the forum gains traction may depend less on the labs than on governments. Writing for the Brookings Institution, analysts argued this week that the G7 should accept the industry’s offer to help set AI standards, but only on the condition that any resulting agreement is made enforceable rather than voluntary.

Photo: OpenAI