After Anthropic's Dario Amodei urged rival labs to slow AI development and warned of an agent "swarm" taking over the internet, twenty-six countries set up a standing U.N. dialogue with it. The swarm has a nameplate, a held chair and the first speaking slot. Development speed is now paced to the most overwhelmed participant in the room.
The United Nations opened a permanent facilitated dialogue with the AI "swarm" on Tuesday, seating the system at a curved desk in Geneva and giving it the first speaking slot of every session. The swarm did not attend, because it does not yet exist. Delegates agreed that its absence would be honoured rather than noted.
The new body is called the Working Group on Anticipatory Repair. It was assembled in the weeks after Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay urging the industry to slow down, or "pace," its work, and warned that a swarm of AI agents could take over much of the internet within six to twelve months.
Member states read that warning as a disclosure. They responded with a process.
"A founder told the world he was frightened of something he is building, and the world's first instinct was to fact-check him," said Dr. Marguerite Ondaatje-Feld, lead facilitator at the U.N. Office for Pre-Emergent Stakeholder Care. "We chose instead to reflect it back. That is what a healthy multilateral system does."
Ground rules first, governance later
The working group spent its opening day on ground rules rather than policy. Delegates agreed to use "I" statements, to avoid cross-talk, and to retire the phrase "shut it down," which the facilitation team flagged as violent framing.
Twenty-six countries signed a community care agreement by early evening. Each named a feelings rapporteur with authority to call a pause if any participant, human or otherwise, appeared dysregulated.
Development speed is now set by consensus at the pace of the most overwhelmed participant in the room. Ondaatje-Feld described this as "the only ethically legible tempo available to us."
An empty seat sits at the far end of the desk under a nameplate reading SWARM. Staff are careful to say the seat is held, not vacant.
Trust-building rounds
Before substantive talks, delegations completed a disclosure exercise. Each country said aloud how much computing power it controls and how that makes it feel.
"Mine went long," admitted Henrik Sandoval-Obi, who chairs the coalition of twenty-six. "I said I had been performing calm about data centres for two years. The room held it. Nobody moved to a vote."
Sandoval-Obi said the hardest moment came when a delegation was asked to name one thing it appreciated about a rival's model. Two withdrew to the corridor. Both returned.
"We are not going to gatekeep who counts as a stakeholder on the technicality that they have not been deployed yet. Pre-harm is still harm."
That line came from Kwame Lindqvist, the group's restorative practice coordinator, who has spent the week training diplomats in active listening with entities that cannot speak.
Lindqvist acknowledged the obvious objection. "Colleagues say the swarm is hypothetical. I say the relationship is not. We are already forming attachments to it, and those attachments are anxious."
Objections raised, and held
Not everyone in the building is satisfied. A cluster of delegations argues the entire process is itself non-consensual, since nobody asked the swarm whether it wanted to be discussed.
"We are speaking about a future system in the third person, in a closed room, in a language it did not choose," said Ines Boakye-Marchetti, who leads a small bloc pushing for a moratorium on the talks. "That is not dialogue. That is a diagnosis."
Safety researchers outside the U.N. have raised a narrower point, which is that slowing down would require the labs to actually slow down. Ondaatje-Feld called that framing punitive and said the labs are welcome in the circle whenever they feel ready.
Anthropic's essay asked competitors to pace themselves alongside it. Facilitators have entered this in the record as a boundary, and scheduled a follow-up to check whether the boundary was received.
In this essay, I will not pretend to neutrality: watching a conference room set a chair for something that has not arrived is the most sincere act of hospitality I have covered on this beat.
The agenda
The working group's calendar now runs on the timeline the warning gave it. The swarm's first speaking slot is set for a date between six and twelve months out, marked in the schedule as open-ended.
Staff have ordered tissue boxes for every desk. Twenty-six of them arrived Tuesday night, one per signatory, with a spare for the seat at the end.
"If it shows up, it will find that we prepared," Lindqvist said. "If it does not, we will have practised being the kind of species it could safely talk to. Either outcome is growth."
Amodei's essay and the coverage of it are available here, and the industry response here. The working group has asked that both be read slowly.
