Microsoft chief backs pacing AI, independent evaluators for superintelligence

Advanced artificial intelligence systems must remain firmly under human oversight while developers pursue deliberate pacing to ensure safe deployment, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Satya Nadella said Sunday.

"Any pursuit of superintelligence has to be grounded in the core principle that if the AI we build is not helping humanity and under human control, it's not worth pursuing," Nadella wrote on US social media company X.

The executive welcomed "deliberate pacing needed to get alignment right" alongside proposals for "embedded evaluators" to monitor systems inside laboratories, urging industry participants to turn safety concepts into concrete operational mechanisms.

He cautioned that governance "cannot be controlled by a handful of entities, but must have broad representation across the ecosystem, countries, and fields, including academia." He added that a healthy frontier ecosystem requires "both closed and open-source models" to thrive.

Nadella argued that enterprises must preserve authority over their "unique and tacit knowledge," noting that organizations should run continuous learning architectures with the ability to control their own model weights without becoming reliant on any single model developer.

He announced that Microsoft will release a code of conduct Monday for public consultation to govern its first-party Microsoft AI (MAI) models.

The remarks follow an intensifying industry debate over safety protocols after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed embedding independent reviewers inside laboratories and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman indicated his firm would adopt the practice.