AI safety debate meets reality at Dreamforce as business leaders say last year's models are enough

Dario Amodei, Anthropic Co-Founder and CEO, and Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO and Co-Founder, attend Dreamforce 2026 summit in San Francisco, California, U.S., Sept.15, 2026.

Carlos Barria | Reuters

At Salesforce's annual Dreamforce mega-conference in San Francisco this week, the keynote conversations between CEO Marc Benioff and the heads of Anthropic, OpenAI and Nvidia delved into the raging AI safety debate, with the execs opining on whether model development is moving too fast.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, while on stage with Benioff, urged frontier labs to "run as fast as you can."

But on the grounds of the 50,000-person event, described over a decade ago as the "Super Bowl of software," the discussion was very different. Far from obsessing over the fears of artificial intelligence and whether the rapid advancements of AI models threaten human existence, attendees said they're having trouble even taking advantage of the technology as it exists today.

"It's already hard enough to keep up," said Alec Bronston, who works at Chicago-based retail data company Spins as senior Salesforce director. A potential slowdown would present "a lot of opportunity to just even catch up and get our feet wet," he said.

Dreamforce had a different tone this year, landing in the middle of a dramatic moment in the AI boom. Days before the conference's kickoff, an Anthropic researcher resigned and, on his way out, said the top labs were "gambling with our lives." That led Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman to propose safety initiatives and to push for a slower pace of model development.

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During Salesforce's last earnings call in August, the company unveiled "Claudeforce," a new way for salespeople to access critical data directly from inside Anthropic's Claude chatbot.

'Way ahead already'

Attendees arrive at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference on Sept. 15, 2026 in Santa Clara, California.

Benjamin Fanjoy | Getty Images

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