Nepal PM: ‘We became victims of wars we never started’

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly, Shah said Nepal had suffered from the effects of climate change despite not being responsible

NEW YORK: Nepalese Prime Minister Balindra “Balin” Shah has said that countries in the region are increasingly bearing the consequences of conflicts and global crises they did not create.

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly, Shah said Nepal had suffered from the effects of climate change despite not being responsible for causing it, and was now also facing the repercussions of wars that it had not started.

He criticised the imbalance in global priorities, saying the world had developed highly efficient systems to support warfare while basic food-supply systems remained deeply troubled.

“This is not only Nepal’s misfortune,” Shah said, pointing to Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as countries facing similar challenges.

The Nepalese premier said the situation exposed deeper weaknesses in international cooperation and raised questions about whether existing global systems were adequately addressing the needs of vulnerable countries.

Moreover, The United Nations Security Council heard warnings this week from leading artificial intelligence executives and experts about the rapid development of AI and the risks posed by increasingly autonomous systems.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue briefed the Council alongside Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award winner and co-chair of the UN’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI. The meeting focused on the implications of advanced AI for international peace and security.

Bengio warned the Council about the dangers posed by AI systems operating beyond effective human control, describing them as a threat “that none can contain alone and that does not respect the borders we defend.”

The discussion highlighted differences among governments and technology leaders over how best to manage the risks associated with increasingly capable AI systems.

The United States rejected calls for new international controls that could constrain AI development. White House science adviser Michael Kratsios said concerns about maintaining human control over AI were not a reason to pause development or impose a new global governance structure.

China’s UN ambassador, Fu Cong, took a different approach, warning against major powers using technological dominance to pursue what he described as “digital hegemony.” He also argued that countries should be free to choose the AI technologies they use and promoted greater access to open-source models.

Liberia’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Lewis Garseedah Brown II, warned that the Security Council should not wait for a major crisis before developing collective safeguards.

“Any technology that impacts war-fighting, sovereignty, and geopolitical stability is squarely within the purview of the Council,” he said.

The UN has already established initiatives aimed at strengthening international cooperation on AI, including the Global Digital Compact and the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI. The scientific panel recently warned that incidents involving increasingly capable AI agents demonstrate potential pathways toward loss of human control.

The Security Council meeting came amid growing concern over AI systems being used in areas ranging from cybersecurity to military applications. Recent incidents involving AI agents have raised questions about whether existing safeguards are keeping pace with advances in AI capabilities