Zuckerberg Rejects an AI Pause, Betting Safety Can Stay Company-by-Company
Zuckerberg Rejects an AI Pause, Betting Safety Can Stay Company-by-Company
The latest dispute over artificial intelligence began with a warning from inside the industry. After an Anthropic researcher resigned, saying AI companies were “gambling with our lives,” Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called on Saturday for a global slowdown in AI development. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis joined the broader push for coordinated restraint.
Their case is straightforward: the technology’s capabilities are accelerating too quickly for any one company’s promises to be enough. But the call also drew suspicion from figures including investor and Trump adviser David Sacks, who suggested the alarm could serve leading labs by making it harder for competitors to catch up.
On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg planted Meta firmly on the other side of the divide. He did not deny AI’s risks, but rejected an industry-wide pause as the wrong remedy. “Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely,” he said, arguing that Meta had made that commitment and its rivals could do the same.
Zuckerberg’s evidence was Meta’s Muse AI agent, whose release the company delayed by several months for safety and security work. “We didn’t call for everyone else to do this before we would,” he said. “We just did it as part of our day-to-day work because it was clearly the right thing for people and for us.”
The disagreement is not merely about caution; it is about control. Zuckerberg has warned that “any policy that slows American model releases — even by a month — could add significant risk to American leadership while letting foreign models race ahead.” With Meta preparing its most powerful model yet, internally called Watermelon, the company is betting that voluntary safeguards—not a collective brake—will keep both users and America’s AI ambitions secure.
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