Javier Milei has branded the UN a "useless organisation" that exists to feed "a caste of parasites". He used his address to the General Assembly in New York on September 23 to attack the body's handling of the Falklands dispute and the COVID-19 pandemic, and to reject calls for state regulation of artificial intelligence.

"The UN has become a useless organisation, which only serves to feed a caste of fatally arrogant parasites disguised as well-intentioned bureaucrats," the Argentine president said.

Milei accused the organisation of abandoning its core mandate. "Those who should guarantee collective security and human rights failed in their task and instead allowed chaos, violence and international terrorism," he said.

He levelled the same charge of impotence at the UN's role in the centuries-old sovereignty dispute with Britain over the Falkland Islands, which he called "a national cause." Argentina calls the islands Las Malvinas, and they have been under British administration since 1833. Milei pointed to oil development authorised by London in waters around the archipelago, which Buenos Aires says breaches a decades-old UN resolution.

"Those who follow the rules receive no reward for doing so, while those who break them face no reprisal," he said. "That is why the Falklands are not only an issue between Argentina and the United Kingdom, it also raises a question about this organisation's ability to enforce its own resolutions."

On AI technology, Milei rejected calls for a slowdown in development and greater state control over artificial intelligence recently made by a number of CEOs of leading AI firms, echoing remarks made by US President Donald Trump the previous day. "The dystopian scenarios that are often invoked to instil fear and promote state control make no economic sense," he said, arguing that the West should lead the technology's development.

The stance mirrors policy at home. In June, Milei and Federico Sturzenegger, his deregulation minister, set out in an FT column a bill that would keep AI free of specific regulation and create "non-human corporations" run by AI agents. The self-described “anarcho-libertarian” has coupled it with tax incentives for data centres under the Super RIGI regime, declaring that Buenos Aires should be for AI "what Amsterdam was for the age of sail".

Yet the pandemic drew the harshest language of his UN tirade. Defending Argentina's exit from the World Health Organization, Milei described lockdowns as "a global experiment in social control disguised as science". "When a state with health blinders takes away from its population the right to work, to be educated, to bury their dead, and this translates into millions of avoidable deaths, there is a word to describe it: genocide," he said.

The speech was Milei's third broadside against the UN in as many years. On his debut in 2024, he called the body an "impotent organisation" and denounced its 2030 Agenda as a "supranational government that is socialist". Last year, speaking to a barely half-full hall, he condemned a "supranational model of governance led by international bureaucrats" and set out four principles for reforming the institution. His votes have matched his rhetoric. At the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro in November 2024, Argentina refused to back several points of the leaders' declaration and distanced itself from the 2030 Agenda. That same month it cast the sole vote against a UN resolution on combating online violence against women and girls.

The WHO withdrawal is the clearest case of that hostility becoming policy. The government announced the move in February 2025, citing "deep differences" over pandemic management and following Trump's decision to pull the US out, and the exit took effect in March. In May, Buenos Aires rebuffed a call from WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to reconsider, even as authorities investigated a deadly hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship that had sailed from Ushuaia. Milei's disdain has limits, however. Argentina's economic stabilisation rests on a $20bn extended fund facility from the IMF, which leaves the president dependent on the multilateral system he has made a career of deriding.