Zuckerberg, Huang Reject Coordinated AI Slowdown Push
Meta and Nvidia say AI companies can slow development when safety demands it without requiring the industry to move in lockstep.
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Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang have pushed back against calls for coordinated limits on frontier AI development, arguing that companies already have strong incentives to make their systems safe.
Their comments sharpen a debate that has widened since Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for AI companies to slow capability gains when safety work cannot keep pace. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has backed greater industry coordination, while stopping short of endorsing every element of Amodei’s proposal.
“There is a lot of debate about slowing progress on capabilities until alignment catches up,” Zuckerberg said Tuesday. “My view is that trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate agents and models.”
Zuckerberg said market incentives already push developers toward safer systems because users will avoid models they cannot trust and companies face liability when their products cause harm.
“Any lab that doesn’t focus on alignment will fall behind,” he said.
He pointed to Meta’s decision to delay the release of its Muse personal AI agent for several months while it worked on safety and security.
“We didn’t call for everyone else to do this before we would,” Zuckerberg 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.”
Meta launched Muse on September 8, describing it as a personal AI agent built with separate security controls and approval requirements for sensitive actions.
Huang made a similar case at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, saying safety should be treated as a core engineering responsibility.
“Safety is paramount in a lot of ways. It’s job one,” Huang said. “However, safety is an engineering problem.”
He said companies should not release systems they believe are unsafe but rejected the idea that speed and safety necessarily conflict.
“Innovation, speed, and safe products, it’s a false choice,” Huang said. “You could definitely have both at the same time.”
“So run as fast as you can,” he added. “But if you feel at any given point in time the company’s out of control, or the product’s not going to be safe, take a pause and make sure you get it right.”
That contrasts with Amodei’s proposal for embedded independent evaluators, common safety standards among frontier laboratories and coordinated limits on unchecked capability growth. He argues that commercial competition could otherwise push companies to develop increasingly powerful systems faster than researchers can understand and control them.
Altman has supported greater coordination. Speaking at Dreamforce, he said it was important for the industry to “come together” and ensure developers have enough time to build AI safely, while acknowledging fears that competitive pressure between companies and countries could undermine restraint.
The disagreement now runs through the top ranks of the AI industry. Amodei and Altman are making the case for collective safeguards and independent oversight, while Zuckerberg and Huang say individual companies can slow down when necessary without requiring the entire industry to move together.
The latter position is also closer to US President Donald Trump’s approach. Trump has opposed calls for an AI slowdown and argued that excessive restrictions could weaken the United States against China.
