Salesforce’s Marc Benioff to AI industry: Regulate yourselves or get sued

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Marc Benioff strode down Mission Street Tuesday afternoon toward Salesforce Tower, where he was set to host a private dinner as part of a whirlwind of events during the company’s annual Dreamforce conference.

Some pedestrians stopped to take photos of the 6-foot-5 CEO, surprised he had taken to the streets.

One person congratulated him on his keynote address earlier in the day; several bodyguards surrounded Benioff as he walked.

Along the way, Benioff, still wearing the pinstripe suit and burgundy tie from the keynote, waved off concerns that AI could wipe out humanity, a topic that has been front-of-mind in Silicon Valley circles during the past week after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit over such worries.

But Benioff, in a walking interview with Fortune , also said companies should be held accountable for risks they create, and he compared current AI issues to early mistakes made in social media.

“We know we have to hold companies responsible for their products and their technology before people are hurt,” Benioff said, while citing the Hawaiian concept of personal responsibility — kuleana — as essential for corporate ethics (Benioff has baked Hawaiian norms deeply into the San Francisco company’s culture .) This year’s Dreamforce conference has again briefly become the center of gravity for the tech industry, with CEOs of major tech companies opining on AI safety risks.

Earlier Tuesday, Benioff was on stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts interviewing OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman.

The OpenAI boss described the July hack of Hugging Face by a swarm of rogue OpenAI agents as a terrifying wakeup call, and he said that companies should pace development so that safety is ahead of capabilities.

During Benioff’s morning keynote at the Moscone Center, he was joined by Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei, who also advocated pacing frontier AI models.

Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang, meanwhile, took a different approach during Benioff’s keynote, saying speed and safety can exist simultaneously.

Separately, Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg also shrugged off concerns, writing Tuesday that AI labs have a natural incentive to create safe AI.

Without offering a concrete solution, Benioff told Fortune that the responsibility largely lies in the hands of companies making AI (some of which Salesforce invests in).

He said in practice, this means companies looking ahead to prevent harm rather than offering excuses after a mistake occurs, and that firms should rank their values so as to decide what takes precedence when priorities conflict.