Mark Zuckerberg Distances Meta From Calls for Coordinated AI Slowdown

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said individual AI companies, rather than the industry as a whole, are responsible for ensuring their technology is developed safely, pushing back against calls from rivals for a coordinated slowdown in advanced artificial intelligence research.

Zuckerberg’s social media comments came after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed a plan that rapidly drew backing from prominent technology leaders, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk at SpaceXAI.

Researchers’ warnings that AI could pose risks to humanity have intensified a broader debate over how the industry should control the technology before it potentially moves beyond human oversight.

AI developers already have strong reasons to build models responsibly and face “significant liability” if their systems cause harm, Zuckerberg said.

“Every lab has 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 happens,” he wrote on X.

Though he did not mention Anthropic or any other company by name, Zuckerberg’s post arrived days after Amodei laid out a three-part AI safety plan. That proposal included having companies and governments work together to slow the pace of AI development.

Zuckerberg said Meta postponed the release of its Muse AI agent by several months while it addressed safety and security concerns.

“We didn’t call for everyone else to do this before we would,” he said.

Instead of pursuing systems capable of automatically enhancing themselves, known as recursive self-improvement, companies should focus on developing safe AI models, Zuckerberg wrote.

“Committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely.”