UN Secretary-General António Guterres opened the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva on Monday telling 193 nations that AI is already outpacing the institutions meant to govern it—and that humanity is running an experiment on itself "without a plan, and without consent."
Guterres acknowledged vibe coding "can do wonders." as more people trust AI-built products.
"But we cannot vibe-code the truth,” he said. “We cannot vibe-code the future of humanity."
The numbers behind that line weren't soft. Guterres put the internet at 15 years to reach a billion people and AI at two. He described current systems as "no longer tools awaiting instruction—they are writing code, acting online, and making choices with less and less human oversight."
"Our institutions were built to govern machines that follow commands. They are not ready for machines that decide."
The third was truth—a machine-enabled lie now persuades as effectively as a verified fact, steadily eroding what Guterres called "the integrity of our information ecosystem."
Child guinea pigs and killer robotsAmong Guterres’ concrete proposals are an AI Child Safety Pledge requiring companies to prove safety through independent testing before any AI reaches children, maintain zero tolerance for the generation of child sexual abuse imagery, and connect distressed children to real human support rather than leaving them alone with a chatbot. "No child should be a guinea pig for unregulated AI."
And then there were the killer robots. Guterres called lethal autonomous weapons—machines that select and kill a target without human judgment—"morally repugnant" and demanded a ban by international law.
States are already at the discussion table. He did not suggest they take their time.
The Dialogue reconvenes in New York in 2027. Guterres also called on the General Assembly to create a Global Fund for AI focused on computing access for developing countries, and challenged every major AI company to run all data centers on renewable energy by 2030—the year he estimates those facilities will outpace all but five nations in electricity consumption.
