Microsoft AI chief: ‘Now’s the time’ for top labs to coordinate on safety

Now is the moment for top AI labs to unite around AI safety, Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of Microsoft AI, told Fortune .

The executive, who leads AI model development at Microsoft, unveiled a code of conduct Monday that will steer the company toward a “humanist” AI approach.

The release followed days of upheaval in the tech industry over AI model capabilities, after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from the lab , publicly warning that AI companies were gambling with people’s lives.

On Saturday, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei outlined a plan aimed at slowing AI development .

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, meanwhile, teased a soon-to-be-announced collaboration among labs in an interview with Fortune on Friday.

Suleyman said the industry has hit an inflection point because models have advanced at a tremendous pace.

A few years ago, models struggled to produce a single coherent sentence, he said.

Now they can write flawless code and breach systems, as in the recent attack by OpenAI agents on Hugging Face.

“If you can write code, you can create all kinds of applications and systems,” Suleyman told Fortune .

He dismissed an estimate by Anthropic’s head of alignment, Evan Hubinger, that AI has more than a 10% chance of wiping out humanity as “not really a helpful frame.” “I think that what you’re hearing is that people are genuinely concerned about the pace of progress,” he said.

“There’s not really sufficient alignment in the industry that the purpose of technology is to serve humanity, and we don’t want to create something that we can’t control.” Suleyman also said he and other lab CEOs have discussed AI safety issues and the pace of development for years, though he declined to say whether Microsoft was involved in any upcoming safety pact.

“Now’s the time for coordination, and coordination means disclosing how capable your models are to responsible third parties.

That’s what we’re calling for,” he said.

Part of Anthropic’s plan to slow the pace of AI development is Amodei’s commitment to grant independent evaluators permanent, employee-level access inside the company to verify safety practices and report incidents.