Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posts an internal warning to employees about AI safety

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images Satya Nadella urged the AI industry to prioritize safety and maintain human control over technology.

The Microsoft CEO supports third-party AI testing amid industry debate over development pace.

AI leaders have debated careful, safety-focused AI model development and testing.

In an internal memo, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella weighed in on the growing debate over whether the AI industry is moving too fast.

Nadella said AI should remain under human control, endorsed broader third-party testing, and warned that companies must take time to make the technology safety, according to the memo, which was posted to a company message board late Monday.

"As the stakes get higher, one should take all the time they need," Nadella wrote.

"If not you will anyway lose permission to operate." His comments follow dire warnings from some AI researchers, who said last week that the technology might kill all humans.

This weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed slower AI development and said his company would allow outside monitoring of its model progress.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman concurred on third-party monitoring and expressed support for slowing deployment when necessary to ensure alignment and safety.

Microsoft AI on Monday released a draft of its 37-page code of conduct for its "humanist" AI models.

"Things we have worried about for a long time in theory have become very real," Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman wrote.

Read the full memo "There was a lot of conversation about AI over the weekend.

As a platform company, for us the focus remains on putting our approach into practice across three areas.

First, we need to be clear about the design goal.