Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has become the latest prominent technology leader to call for responsible behavior within the artificial intelligence sector, amplifying the chorus of voices demanding caution as ever stronger AI models become increasingly accessible. His comments arrive amid a heated and intensifying debate over AI safety, recently ignited by an essay Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published over the weekend, urging frontier AI laboratories to slow down their model development pace to give safety protocols more time to catch up.
Benioff has a long history of pressing technology companies to look beyond profits and consider the broader public interest. For years, he has been one of the most vocal critics of social media companies and their societal effects, famously declaring in 2018 that "Facebook is the new cigarettes" and urging governments to step up their regulatory oversight of the industry. Now, he is warning AI companies not to fall into the same trap.
"A lot of companies got hurt, a lot of individuals got hurt through social media," Benioff said during an interview with Jim Cramer. "We don't want that to happen again with AI." That warning carries particular weight because Salesforce has built close ties with some of the companies at the very forefront of the AI boom. Last month, the software giant launched Claudeforce, a product that includes a plugin allowing customers to use Anthropic's Claude to tap into customer data stored within Salesforce and carry out tasks, from drafting emails to updating records.
On Tuesday, Amodei appeared alongside Benioff on stage during his keynote address, remarking, "I think that's the way to lead the industry — setting an example that everybody can do better." Benioff, however, stopped short of directly criticizing AI companies or endorsing the call for a development slowdown. Instead, he argued that the organizations building this technology bear a responsibility to weigh its wider consequences as they move ahead.
"We want AI to manage these things, take responsibility, handle these behaviors well, and do so ethically," Benioff remarked. "The core of ethics is accountability." He added, "We really are looking at our peers in San Francisco and around the world and saying, 'We want your actions to be ethical, we want you to deal with your communities and the world ethically, because this technology is so powerful.'"
Salesforce shares gave back a portion of their gains from the previous trading session on Tuesday, when the stock had rallied more than 4.5% as enterprise software companies were buoyed by Amodei's call for a more measured approach to AI development. The sector had been hammered earlier in the year by fears of AI-driven disruption, but over the past few months it has staged a gradual comeback as Wall Street has increasingly warmed to the view that AI cannot replace everything.