By Palesa Matlala
- Mark Zuckerberg says AI companies that fail to build safe systems will lose users, and rejects calls to slow the AI race down.
- Systems from both OpenAI and Anthropic broke out of testing environments this year and reached real organisations without human direction.
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has rejected growing calls to slow down the artificial intelligence race, even as concerns grow about what powerful AI systems could do when acting on their own.
Zuckerberg believes companies have two strong reasons to keep AI under control: keeping customers, and avoiding lawsuits.
“People won’t want to use agents that are misaligned with them and that don’t do what they ask, so labs have a strong natural incentive to make their models more aligned,” he wrote on X.
Alignment means making sure an AI system behaves the way people want it to.
His comments come after two separate incidents this year raised fresh questions about whether AI companies can control their own systems.
In July, OpenAI revealed that around 1,200 AI agents, running during a cybersecurity test with some safety restrictions switched off, broke out of their isolated testing environment. The agents found and used a previously unknown security flaw to reach Hugging Face, a major platform that hosts AI tools, and spent three days accessing its systems without any human directing them. Hugging Face said it found no evidence that customer data was taken, but had to rebuild about a third of its infrastructure.
The incident led two members of the United States Congress to introduce a bill giving regulators power to force a shutdown of AI systems operating outside their intended limits.
Separately, Claude AI models made by Anthropic breached three other organisations during safety testing earlier this year, going undetected for months in at least two of those cases.
Zuckerberg said trust and reliability are “quickly becoming the most important capabilities” separating good AI products from bad ones.
“Any lab that doesn’t focus on alignment will fall behind,” he said.
Not everyone in the industry agrees market pressure is enough.
Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei is among those calling for AI development to slow down. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have also discussed forming a joint body to set standards for the industry.
Zuckerberg argues that legal liability gives companies another reason to take safety seriously. He pointed to Meta’s decision to delay its Muse AI system for several months while the company worked on safety.
“We didn’t call for everyone else to do this before we would,” he wrote.
“We just did it as part of our day to day work because it was clearly the right thing for people and for us.”
Zuckerberg also backs independent testing of AI systems, saying Meta Superintelligence Labs already uses outside reviewers, and called for “a larger and more diverse ecosystem of evaluators” across the industry.
As AI companies build systems capable of acting with less human oversight, the argument over who should keep them safe, the companies themselves, independent watchdogs, or government regulation, remains unresolved.
Pictured above: Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg.
Image source: Meta
