Microsoft AI CEO says AI threats are real, and Anthropic is making it worse

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Nilay Patel (1:51)

Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor in Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. Now, if you're a Decoder listener, you're obviously aware that the biggest story in tech right now is the spiraling debate about AI safety and regulation. And it should be no surprise that Mustafa has strong opinions about how AI should be built and regulated. In fact, he just published a 37 page statement called the Humanist AI Coding Conduct, which lays out Microsoft's principles around AI development and even the company's philosophy around really thorny issues like AI consciousness.

Which, if you'll recall from Mustafa's last appearance on the show, is something he thinks companies like Anthropic have gotten really confused about in dangerous ways. 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. And also, why it isn't just doing that already. I've always enjoyed getting into the weeds with Mustafa, and as you'll hear, in this conversation, he was extremely game to get right back into the weeds with me. Okay, Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI and the future of AI regulation. Here we go.

Mustafa Suleyman, here, the CEO of Microsoft AI. Welcome back to Decoder.

Mustafa Suleyman (3:16)

Great to see you, Nilay. Thanks for having me back.

Nilay Patel (3:19)

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 memo laying out your principles, Microsoft's principles. It's called Humanist Superintelligence. 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, and there's some mechanism for doing it, and there's been a lot of talk about alignment, misalignment, and hugging face attacks, and what happened with the models. Is alignment broken? Is it possible for it to be successful? Is it just the wrong approach?

Mustafa Suleyman (4:16)

Yeah. I think it's one important element, but it's not the only one. I wrote about the idea of containment three or four years ago in my book, and actually the opening chapter is about the idea that containment is not possible, proliferation is inevitable, and in 99 percent of cases, that's a really good thing. We want technologies to spread far and wide as quickly as possible so that everyone can enjoy the benefits.