Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff joins growing chorus of tech leaders warning about AI risks

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Mad Money

Published Tue, Sep 15 20266:31 PM EDT

Key Points

• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff joined the growing debate over AI safety, warning the industry to act responsibly as increasingly powerful models are developed.
• Benioff pointed to the harms caused by social media as a cautionary tale, saying AI companies should avoid repeating the same mistakes.

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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."