Senator Murphy Demands AI Regulation as Nobel Laureate, Tech Leaders Sound Alarms at UN Forum

Foreign Policy's Tech and AI Forum during UN General Assembly Week brought together ministers, Nobel laureates, labor leaders, and tech executives for a sweeping debate on AI's threat to democracy, jobs, and global equity — with the sharpest call coming from a US senator who says Americans are being used as "guinea pigs" for unchecked technology.

• Senator Murphy calls for mandatory AI regulation within 12 months, including deepfake bans, friendship bot restrictions, and a third-party model approval process
• Nobel laureate Maria Ressa warns AI has "hacked" human attention, intimacy, and agency in three waves, with 74% of the world now under authoritarian rule
• McKinsey projects COVID-scale workforce disruption sustained for a decade, with 11 million US jobs in transition and 25 million requiring new skills
• Microsoft security chief says agentic AI has rewritten the "physics of cybersecurity", with 1 million AI agents running inside the company
• Mozilla Foundation argues open-source AI is a precondition for sovereignty, warning frontier model consolidation threatens global creativity
• AFL-CIO and faith leaders unite across partisan lines to demand worker voice in AI deployment, citing union-negotiated technology notice clauses
• GSMA reports 3.1 billion people have mobile coverage but remain offline, with a memory crisis doubling the cost of affordable smartphones

Why it matters: The most powerful US legislative voice on AI at the forum framed the domestic regulation debate in national security terms — arguing that China wants the US to remain unregulated.