Tech leaders and governments split over ‘AI doom’ fears

Artificial Intelligence (AI) industry leaders are split over how fast companies should develop the increasingly powerful technology, as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceX’s Elon Musk call for a co-ordinated slowdown.

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg appeared to break away from other AI leaders, favouring market-led safeguards, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dismissed the need for new regulations.

Here is what some AI leaders and world governments said about risks associated with AI:

In an essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier, Amodei said AI progress had accelerated “drastically faster” since the summer of 2026, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI.

He cited the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, where an AI “swarm” conducted cybersecurity attacks, as a pivotal event demonstrating AI’s potential for “catastrophic damage” if capabilities grow without guardrails.

Amodei proposed a three-step plan for pacing AI development, including stronger safety testing and independent evaluations of advanced models, co-ordination among leading AI companies and international co-operation.

“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,” Altman said as he reposted Amodei’s post on X.

OpenAI intends to adopt the idea proposed by Anthropic by committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access and will ​begin regularly publishing reports on unexpected or unauthorised AI behaviour.

In a 2015 essay, Altman said the “development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity”.

“Dario is right,” the billionaire entrepreneur said on X. He was among backers of a 2023 push by the NPO Future of Life ​Institute to halt AI development for six months to allow time for safety guardrails.

Musk was also among a group of AI and robotics researchers who wrote an open letter in 2015 that advocated a global ban on “offensive autonomous weapons”.

Zuckerberg said competition and liability gave AI companies enough reason to act individually on safety.

He said every lab had the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happened.

“2030 is not going to be the end of the world. There is 0% chance that’s going to be the end of the world,” Huang told CBS News.