Zuckerberg says AI labs can self-regulate, rejects industry slowdown calls

Zuckerberg says AI labs have strong incentives to make models safe and aligned, pointing to Meta's delayed Muse release and support for independent evaluators as a recognised industry best practice

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has rejected calls for a coordinated slowdown in artificial intelligence (AI) development, arguing that individual AI labs have both the responsibility and the incentives to slow their work when safety requires it.

In a post on X, Zuckerberg said labs could take their own measures to ensure models are developed safely, rather than waiting for an industry-wide agreement on the pace of AI development. His comments come after Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called for the industry to "pace the frontier" of AI development and backed independent safety evaluations. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and others have supported parts of Amodei's proposal.

He argued that trust and alignment, or ensuring AI systems behave according to users' intentions, would increasingly become important differentiators between AI models.

"There is a lot of debate about slowing progress on capabilities until alignment catches up," Zuckerberg said. "My view is that trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate agents and models."

Zuckerberg also pointed to commercial and legal incentives for AI companies to improve safety. Users, he said, would not want to use agents that were misaligned with their instructions, while companies faced liability if their systems caused harm.