Where Sam Altman, Elon Musk and more tech execs stand on AI guardrails

The debate over how far, and how fast, artificial intelligence is advancing poses a serious dilemma for tech executives. They’re keen to telegraph their concerns about the technology’s potential perils and have offered various remedies that include slowing down its development.

But having plowed hundreds of billions of dollars into AI, they’re trying to calm people down without spooking investors and customers.

The debate intensified last week  when Anthropic PBC researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and warned that the researchers building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”.

His concerns were echoed publicly by other Anthropic personnel, including alignment science lead Evan Hubinger, who said he believes there is a greater than 10% chance the technology could cause human extinction within the next decade.

Read: Silicon Valley escalates warnings about existential risks of AI

President Donald Trump weighed in, rejecting the need for AI guardrails and taking aim at Anthropic chief executive officer Dario Amodei, who argued in a blog post on Saturday that AI capabilities are advancing faster than safeguards can keep up.

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Amodei proposed greater independent oversight and coordination among companies and governments.

In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump blamed a “SICK conspiracy” for voter backlash on AI data centres and increased concern about frontier models, adding that “the only one that is happy about it is China”.

Dario Amodei Image: Jason Henry/Bloomberg

Here’s what the industry’s most prominent executives are saying about where artificial intelligence should go from here:

Elon Musk, SpaceX/SpaceXAI
“Dario is right,” he wrote in a post on X.

Sam Altman, OpenAI
“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon,” he wrote in a post on X.

Sam Altman Image: Cornell Watson/Bloomberg

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Aidan Gomez, Cohere
“A mechanism that slows everyone down while explicitly preserving existing commercial advantage does not make AI safer,” he said in a blog post criticising the universal AI slowdown proposal. Gomez said guardrails are necessary, but argued that AI development should move at a responsible pace that society can keep up with.

Read: Nvidia’s Huang says AI industry doesn’t need any new laws

Satya Nadella,  Microsoft
“Any pursuit of superintelligence has to be grounded in the core principle that if the AI we build is not helping humanity and under human control, it’s not worth pursuing,” he wrote in a post on X.

Satya Nadella Image: David Ryder/Bloomberg

Clément Delangue, Hugging Face
“It’s now clear that alignment is critical and won’t be solved behind the closed doors of a handful of frontier labs,” Delangue wrote, while quoting Amodei’s post on X. Delangue announced Hugging Face’s Open Alignment Initiative and said the company was seeking to participate in the “embedded evaluators” programme that Amodei had just committed Anthropic to.

Read: OpenAI makes AI safety changes in wake of hugging face breach

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George Kurtz, CrowdStrike
“Pacing what comes next doesn’t secure what’s already here,” he said in a post on X. Kurtz argued that rather than trying to slow AI development, the cybersecurity industry should focus on building defenses capable of keeping pace with increasingly autonomous AI systems, including independent testing, stronger security controls and human oversight for high-impact decisions.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta
“I personally am much more worried about a small number of labs or people having control of something that is so capable,” he said last week on the Sources podcast. Zuckerberg argued that AI is safer when access to it is widely distributed rather than concentrated among a few companies. He criticised AI labs that develop increasingly advanced models but choose not to release them, calling that approach “quite dangerous”, though he didn’t name any companies.

Read: Britain will ‘heed warnings’ over AI, Burnham’s deputy says

Mark Zuckerberg Image: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg

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