The AI Slowdown Debate Crashed Salesforce’s Party

Decked out in purple and plaid, Gwen Stefani belted her 2002 single “Underneath It All” to a packed conference center in San Francisco on Tuesday morning—but she was just the warm-up. At the end of her performance, Stefani shouted “Dreamforce! Let’s go!” into a checkered microphone before Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff strode into the spotlight. Dreamforce is billed as the world’s largest enterprise software conference but feels more like attending a megachurch—especially this year.

Benioff roamed the audience while delivering his Dreamforce sermon, followed by a teleoperated camera on wheels that beamed his face to screens hanging from the cavernous room’s ceiling. Within minutes, he ordered up a graph of Salesforce’s annual revenue, which the company projects will top $46 billion in 2027, thanks in part to demand for its AI-powered products. The audience applauded. But hanging over the whole event was a dark question: Is artificial intelligence really worth risking all our lives for?

Between flashy software demonstrations of agents building dashboards, conference-goers watched Silicon Valley leaders debate whether the AI industry should keep barreling ahead or if the government needs to slow AI progress to prevent catastrophic risks stemming from the technology.

Last week, AI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic and publicly warned that companies racing toward self-improving AI systems were “gambling with our lives.” By the weekend, other Anthropic employees were echoing his concerns, and CEO Dario Amodei was urging world leaders to help “pace the frontier” of AI development. Other AI CEOs then began endorsing the idea, including Amodei’s greatest rival, OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

Onstage, 6-foot-5 Benioff towered over Anthropic’s CEO, vigorously shaking Amodei’s hand just before asking for his latest assessment of AI progress. While this is undoubtedly Benioff’s show, Anthropic has become a critical partner helping usher Salesforce into the AI era.