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The United Nation’s “Independent” AI Panel warning governments about the dangers of advanced artificial intelligence has financial and personnel ties to OpenAI and Anthropic – the frontier AI companies building the technology the panel was created to assess – a Byline Times investigation has established.
In response to this publication’s enquiries, the UN has disclosed that measures including recusal from specific discussions were agreed after an assessment of the conflicts of interest.
The UN AI panel’s latest briefing largely echoes the warnings in recent weeks from frontier AI firms, warning that the “safeguards designed today” may fail “once agents can understand them and plan around them. In simple terms, the traditional model of safeguarding is unravelling.”
However, a Byline Times investigation has revealed that the panel has extensive ties to the very companies it is assessing. Its co-chair, Yoshua Bengio, advised OpenAI at its launch and now leads LawZero, an AI organisation supported by funders of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Kevin Kohler, one of the writers of the panel’s July preliminary report, simultaneously worked full-time for a think tank funded by the same philanthropic network that built both frontier AI giants – an affiliation omitted from the report’s credits.
“Each declaration was assessed for possible or actual conflicts, and mitigation measures, including recusal from specific discussions, were agreed,” states an FAQ published on the panel’s website, which was updated in response to Byline Times’ inquiries.
The answer does not identify the interests concerned, or name the members who agreed to stand aside from particular discussions.
“We have published answers to many of the questions you raised on the Panel’s website,” a spokesperson for the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies, told Byline Times.
These potential conflicts of interest reach into the panel’s latest assessment, published on 21 September. Examining an incident involving OpenAI and Hugging Face, the brief warns about the risk of losing human control over AI. It draws on Bengio’s own work and discusses research from his organisation, LawZero.

The 40-member Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence was appointed by the UN General Assembly in February to assess AI’s opportunities, risks and impacts. Bengio co-chairs it alongside Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa. Its findings are intended to inform how governments worldwide govern the technology.
The potential conflicts also extend to the panel’s creation. The Simon Institute for Longterm Governance, which employed Kevin Kohler during his report drafting assignment, helped shape the negotiations over the panel’s design.
Open Philanthropy, which funded OpenAI and supports Yoshua Bengio’s LawZero through its successor Coefficient Giving, also financed the expansion of effective altruism and longtermism, which have intellectual roots in eugenics – the pursuit of supposedly superior human populations through selective reproduction. The same philanthropic network helped finance AI developers and organisations warning of their technology’s dangers, and now supports organisations employing people responsible for the UN’s independent assessments.
Neither the UN AI panel’s September brief nor its July preliminary report publishes individual declarations of interest or records of members standing aside from decisions because of a conflict.
One of the writers of the UN AI panel’s July report was simultaneously employed full-time by a think tank that had helped shape the panel itself.
Kevin Kohler’s CV records a UN University consultancy in scientific editing and drafting from April to July 2026. Yet throughout those months, he was also a senior technology policy specialist at the Simon Institute for Longterm Governance. While the July report cred…