Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on Tuesday became the latest tech leader to urge the artificial intelligence industry to act responsibly as increasingly powerful models become more widely used.
His comments come amid an intensifying debate over AI safety, fueled most recently by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s weekend essay calling for frontier AI labs to slow the pace of model development to give safety measures more time to catch up.
Benioff has a history of imploring tech companies to think of the greater good. For years, he’s been an outspoken critic of social media companies and their impact on society, declaring in 2018 that “Facebook is the new cigarettes,” and calling for greater government regulation of the industry.
Now, he is warning AI companies not to repeat the same mistakes. “A lot of companies got hurt, a lot of individuals got hurt through social media,” Benioff told Jim Cramer in a “Mad Money” interview from the sidelines of his company’s annual Dreamforce event in San Francisco. “We don’t want that to happen in AI.”
The warning is particularly notable given Salesforce’s deep ties to the companies at the forefront of the AI boom. Last month, Salesforce unveiled Claudeforce, which includes a plugin allowing clients to use Anthropic’s Claude to tap customer data stored in Salesforce and perform tasks such as composing emails and updating records. On Tuesday, Amodei appeared on stage during Benioff’s keynote address and said, “I think that’s the way to lead the industry forward, to set an example, to say that everyone can always be better.”
Benioff has stopped short of criticizing AI companies or endorsing calls to slow AI development. Instead, he argued that companies building the technology have a responsibility to consider its broader consequences as they push ahead. “We want AI to take care of these things and be held responsible, and take care of these actions and be ethical,” Benioff said. “The heart of ethics is responsibility.”
He added, “We really look at a light on our brethren here in San Francisco and all over the world and say, ‘We want you to be ethical in your actions and how you take care of your communities and the world,’ because this technology is very powerful.”
Salesforce shares on Tuesday gave back some of their more than 4.5% advance from the prior session. Enterprise software stocks soared Monday on Amodei’s call to slow down AI development. The group, which was crushed earlier this year on AI disruption fears, has been making a comeback over the past few months as Wall Street warms to the idea that AI can’t replace everything. Salesforce is up more than 50% from its 52-week low of $146 in late June. The stock has been a long-time holding in the CNBC Investing Club portfolio.
