The sentence that will be quoted has two parts. We have slowed down on our own in the past. We will do it again.
Said before the Security Council, by the man who runs OpenAI. It sounds like a concession. It also reads as a position: we decide when to stop, and we have proved it.
Fact
The facts: on 23 September 2026 OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed the UN Security Council, and the company published the full text. He named two ways AI progress could go very badly: losing control of the future, if the technology moves so fast that people cannot follow and intervene, and too much power concentrated in too few hands. He called for “extreme care” around systems that improve themselves and their future versions, and said models should not be trained without a very strong case that they will remain under human control. Verbatim: “We have unilaterally slowed down in the past. We will do so in the future.” Altman proposed a mechanism for complementary national and international frontier AI standards - for measuring capabilities, assessing risks, judging whether safeguards are sufficient and preserving human oversight - as well as fast incident reporting and secure channels between governments, critical infrastructure operators and experts. In his words, the standards must not lock the market in favour of incumbents. In the speech he also stated that an OpenAI model had solved the Navier-Stokes equations, one of the Millennium Prize Problems; that is his claim from the podium.
What is new in the speech
Not the warning about losing control, which they have repeated for years.
The new part is the second one. Altman tells governments that a company or country convinced only it can be trusted with this technology can use that belief to justify almost anything. And that the important decisions must not be made by labs in San Francisco alone. That is a sentence someone will read back to him one day.
The speech is good. Its test is the next time stopping will cost money.
On Navier-Stokes: the claim is enormous and it was dropped in passing. We will accept it when mathematicians accept it, not when the seller says it.
The words stand, verbatim, on OpenAI's site.
Official primary sources
OpenAI - Sam Altman's remarks at the United Nations Security Council, 23.09.2026The visual is generated code-art, no third-party images.