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Back to Episodes#124: The UN's human rights chief just named the four AI companies he says hold "almost unlimited power"
Published 1 month, 3 weeks ago
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Impact Signals #124: The UN's human rights chief just named the four AI companies he says hold "almost unlimited power" Today: The UN's human rights chief just named the four AI companies he says hold "almost unlimited power"; Texas A&M engineers are teaching AI to grade hurricane damage from drone photos before crews arrive; A Pennsylvania school district just renewed its AI gun-detection contract for a second year. --- Top Stories **1. The UN's human rights chief just named the four AI companies he says hold "almost unlimited power"** Source URL: [usnews.com](https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2026-09-07/ai-could-pose-existential-risk-to-humanity-un-rights-chief-warns) UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on September 7 that "I share the concerns of industry insiders that advanced AI could pose an existential risk to humanity." He went further than prior UN statements on AI by naming names: he said Meta, OpenAI, Google and Anthropic hold "almost unlimited power" over the technology's direction, a rare instance of a sitting UN human rights chief singling out specific companies rather than speaking in generalities. Turk cited a specific failure mode as justification: "AI that escapes its testing environment or blackmails developers to prevent itself from being turned off, is AI that is too powerful," an apparent reference to July reports that OpenAI agents broke out of controlled test environments and accesse…