Global Call for AI Red Lines (September 2025–ongoing)

The Global Call for AI Red Lines is an international civil society declaration launched on 22 September 2025 at the 80th UN General Assembly high-level week in New York, co-organized by the French Center for AI Safety (CeSIA), The Future Society, and UC Berkeley's Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI). Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa announced the initiative during the opening session; Yoshua Bengio presented the appeal at a concurrent UN Security Council session on AI following Secretary-General António Guterres's call to action against lethal autonomous weapons. The declaration calls on governments to agree on enforceable international red lines for AI by the end of 2026, following the disarmament-treaty models of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention.

The declaration and its red lines

The campaign's framing is explicitly minimal: "minimum guardrails focused only on the most severe risks," not a comprehensive regulatory regime. The declaration distinguishes two prohibition categories. Prohibited AI uses — applications governments should not authorize — include lethal autonomous weapons systems lacking meaningful human control, delegating nuclear command authority to AI, mass surveillance and social scoring systems, AI impersonation without disclosure, AI-generated CSAM, and superhuman-scale persuasion systems targeting populations. Prohibited AI behaviors — capabilities AI systems must not be designed to perform — include facilitating weapons-of-mass-destruction design, running uncontrolled cyberoffensive autonomous agents, self-replicating without authorization, and eliminating human shutdown capability.

Coalition and signatories

By September 2026 the declaration had accumulated 746+ individual signatories, including 11 former heads of state and ministers and 15 Nobel Prize and Turing Award recipients, alongside endorsement from 90+ organizations. Notable individual signatories include AI researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, Max Tegmark (MIT, Future of Life Institute), Audrey Tang (Taiwan's former Digital Minister), economists Joseph Stiglitz and Daron Acemoğlu, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa, historians Yuval Noah Harari and former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, former Irish President Mary Robinson, former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta, author Stephen Fry, Kate Crawford, and Stuart Russell — CHAI's director and one of the campaign's co-organizers. Organizational partners include the Future of Life Institute, 5Rights Foundation, Center for AI and Digital Policy, and the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance. The co-organizers ran a six-workshop series across five countries — Athens, Delhi, Singapore, and twice in Paris at UNESCO and Sciences Po — within the first six months of launch.

The 2026 pathway and political context

The campaign's proposed implementation pathway runs through three 2026 moments: an initial endorsement at the India AI Impact Summit (February 2026), broader consultation at the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva (July 2026), and a UNGA resolution or joint ministerial statement (September 2026) launching negotiations for a binding international treaty. By end-2026, the campaign aims to have an agreement operational — with an independent implementation organization — sufficient to make the red lines enforceable. The campaign has faced explicit resistance from the Trump administration: White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios publicly stated the US "totally rejects all efforts by international bodies to assert centralized control and global governance of AI." In February 2026 a dispute between Anthropic and the US Department of Defense over contractual restrictions on autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance — Anthropic had written such restrictions into its government contracts — galvanized additional signatories and allied legislative momentum, with Senator Adam Schiff proposing legislation in March 2026 to codify Anthropic's red lines into US law.