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The debate over how far, and how fast, artificial intelligence is advancing poses a serious dilemma for tech executives. They’re keen to telegraph their concerns about the technology’s potential perils and have offered various remedies that include slowing down its development. But having plowed hundreds of billions of dollars into AI, they’re trying to calm people down without spooking investors and customers.

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The debate intensified last week when Anthropic PBC researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and warned that the researchers building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” His concerns were echoed publicly by other Anthropic personnel, including alignment science lead Evan Hubinger, who said he believes there is a greater than 10 per cent chance the technology could cause human extinction within the next decade.

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President Donald Trump weighed in, rejecting the need for AI guardrails and taking aim at Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, who argued in a blog post on Saturday that AI capabilities are advancing faster than safeguards can keep up. Amodei proposed greater independent oversight and coordination among companies and governments. In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump blamed a “SICK conspiracy” for voter backlash on AI data centres and increased concern about frontier models, adding that “the only one that is happy about it is China.”

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Here’s what the industry’s most prominent executives are saying about where artificial intelligence should go from here:

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Elon Musk, SpaceX/SpaceXAI: “Dario is right,” he wrote in a post on X.

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Sam Altman, OpenAI: “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon,” he wrote in a post on X.

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Aidan Gomez, Cohere: “A mechanism that slows everyone down while explicitly preserving existing commercial advantage does not make AI safer,” he said in a blog post criticizing the universal AI slowdown proposal. Gomez said guardrails are necessary, but argued that AI development should move at a responsible pace that society can keep up with.

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Satya Nadella, Microsoft: “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,” he wrote in a post on X.