Mark Zuckerberg rejects calls for industrywide AI slowdown

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg pushed back on calls for AI companies to work together to slow the pace of their products’ development, following warnings from inside AI labs of the potential for human annihilation via rogue technology.

In an interview with NBC News’ chief tech analyst Joanna Stern, Zuckerberg said that leading AI companies could slow down or pause development of their own products if they felt the technology was unsafe. His position cuts against recent calls for coordinated action from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“I don’t think that we need some kind of industrywide coordination,” Zuckerberg said. “I think that each lab needs to take the time, and when it sees that there are issues, you just take the time that you need internally to basically make sure that you’re proceeding safely.”

His comments came during a wide-ranging discussion with Stern about Meta’s approach to AI, wearable devices and privacy. Zuckerberg expanded on comments he posted on X last week, distancing himself from Amodei and Altman’s calls to “pace” or regulate the speed of AI development.

Zuckerberg staked out a defiant position amid growing concern about risks from advanced AI systems. In early September, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon set off a wave of pitched concerns when he resigned over fears that AI systems could spiral out of human control in the next few years.

Amodei released an essay calling for intercompany efforts to “pace the frontier” of AI development, which Altman soon endorsed alongside Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis and xAI’s Elon Musk.

Zuckerberg said there was no need for such efforts, which critics have said are a Trojan horse that could allow AI companies to shut out competition and take control of efforts to regulate the industry.

“I happen to think that there’s plenty of commercial incentive to get this right,” he said.

Amodei and Altman briefed the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday, using the session to make their case for cooperation on slowing down the rate of AI progress in order to have more time to develop adequate safety and monitoring measures.

Speaking to Stern in California, Zuckerberg emphasized that customers would naturally flock to the products that served their purposes best and said that an unsafe or unwieldy product would scare away potential users.

“If you’re building a product, people aren’t going to want to use it if it doesn’t do what they want,” he said.

The company’s Muse AI agent, an autonomous AI assistant, has soared in popularity in recent weeks. Released on Sept. 8, it can perform a raft of actions on behalf of users — from booking plane tickets and replying to emails to compiling research briefs and canceling unused magazine subscriptions. Muse is now the most popular free offering on the Apple App and Google Play stores.

Several AI companies — including Amazon and Nvidia — have also released their own AI agents since the first widespread consumer-facing agent, OpenClaw, burst onto the AI scene in November.

As an example of Muse’s capabilities, Zuckerberg said his own Muse agent helped give feedback on his mixed martial arts performance by connecting to cameras watching over his workout area.

“You’re basically going to have an extremely capable assistant who can understand the things that you care about,” Zuckerberg said.

Rather than worry about distant apocalyptic scenarios from rapidly improving AI systems, Zuckerberg said, AI companies should focus on making sure their systems understand users’ desires and intents and handle that information with discretion.

“Nailing those things are going to be the most important next things to align with what people actually want in the world,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg pointed out that the Muse system is actually several agents working together — another Meta AI agent, called Sentinel, oversees and polices the main Muse agent. If the Sentinel observes the Muse agent potentially exceeding its remit, the oversight agent can alert users and ask for human permission before carrying out any further actions.

“The AI agent needs to be trained from the ground up to have a sense of what information is OK to share and what isn’t,” Zuckerberg said. Muse and other AI agents have stoked privacy concerns, given the amount of information and access that users can provide to them, including linking email accounts, bank cards and more so they can act without human intervention.

Zuckerberg said users’ information was safe with Meta, pointing to the company’s track record on privacy and WhatsApp’s encrypted messaging as evidence that users could trust Muse with their data.

“We’ve shown that we have the ability to build those kinds of world-class, leading security systems,” Zuckerberg said, mentioning that Meta worked with a field-leading cryptographer behind the popular anonymous Signal messaging app to develop its own secure technology. “I think that’s something that people can feel very good about.”

Taking stock of the larger AI landscape, Zuckerberg distanced himself from warnings from Coxon and other researchers that AI could cause human extinction within a few years. Instead, he highlighted how personalized AI systems could revolutionize human life — echoing his August essay about the dawn of personalized superintelligence.

“There’s a lot of rhetoric that is filled with doom,” Zuckerberg said. “I’m quite optimistic about the fact that this is going to be a very positive future for everyone.”