Microsoft AI CEO says AI threats are real, and Anthropic is making it worse
Today, I’m talking with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. As you’re no doubt aware, the biggest story in tech right now is the spiraling debate about AI safety and regulation. It should come as no surprise that Mustafa has strong opinions on how AI should be built and regulated. Microsoft just published a 37-page statement called the “Humanist AI Code of Conduct,” which lays out the company’s principles around AI development and even its philosophy around really thorny issues like AI consciousness. If you’ll recall from his last appearance on the show, Mustafa thinks companies like Anthropic have gotten really confused about this concept of so-called model welfare in fairly dangerous ways. He actually put out a companion essay this week specifically criticizing Anthropic’s philosophy around AI consciousness, and how he sees it fitting into the broader alignment debate. So I really wanted to talk to Mustafa about what he thinks is real and not in AI safety, whether the concept of alignment itself is up to the task, and whether this industry needs to slow down before it kills us all. Also: Why isn’t the AI industry just… doing all of this already? I’ve always enjoyed getting into the weeds with Mustafa, and he was very game to get into it with me here. Okay. Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, on the future of AI regulation. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Mustafa Suleyman, you re the CEO of Microsoft AI.
Welcome back to Decoder . Great to see you, Nilay. Thanks for having me back. It is great to see you. I m very excited to talk to you about what on earth is going on in the AI safety and regulation debate. You just published a very long, very detailed document laying out your principles, Microsoft s principles, around what you’re calling “Humanist AI.” There s a lot of ideas in there I want to unpack. The more I have been thinking about this conversation, the more I want to start with a really foundational question. It s something that I had lightly been seeing, but might be the root of all of this. The basic way that we have been talking about AI safety is something called alignment — we re going to make the models do the right thing intrinsically in some way. There s some mechanism for doing it.