Tech leaders split in public over slowing AI development

Speaking at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang said the industry does not need AI regulation and that safety should be left to the companies building the systems¹. Artificial intelligence firms’ own leaders should decide whether new versions of models are safe to release, he argued, saying AI does not need new laws². He also pushed back on calls to give AI companies antitrust exemptions so they could coordinate a slowdown in advanced model development⁷.

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg sided with Huang rather than with Anthropic’s chief executive³, rejecting a coordinated slowdown and pointing to competition and legal accountability as the disciplining forces⁴.

Why it matters to investors

On the other side, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei renewed his call for a slowdown, and Elon Musk of xAI and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have also recently called for a slower pace of AI development⁵. Huang’s comments diverged from those of the Anthropic and OpenAI chief executives at the same event, and landed days after Amodei published an essay urging the industry to slow down⁶.

The venue is worth noting. The exchange took place at a customer conference rather than in a policy forum, with Nvidia’s chief executive and the heads of Anthropic and OpenAI putting their arguments to the same audience^1,6. Amodei’s essay preceded it by days, which is what turned a disagreement about engineering practice into a public dispute over whether the industry can police itself^5,6.

The disagreement is already priced. Global AI stocks fell on Monday after top AI leaders endorsed slowing the development of frontier models⁸. SoftBank shares slid by as much as 13% in that selloff, on the same day it was reported to have secured an $11.87bn loan tied to its OpenAI investment⁹.

What to watch

The immediate question is whether any coordinated pause is structurally possible, given that the mechanism proposed for it, an antitrust waiver, has been publicly attacked by the largest supplier of AI compute^1,7. Without that cover, a slowdown depends on each firm acting alone against competitors who have said they will not^3,4.

The policy clock is the second variable. Experts fear the US regulation window is closing fast ahead of the midterm elections¹⁰. For investors, the split matters because the same executives set the capital spending plans that the chip complex trades on, and Monday showed how quickly sentiment on the pace of development moves those shares^8,9.