Salesforce CEO compares AI warnings to his past 'Facebook is a cigarette' call
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has urged tech leaders to prioritize ethical responsibility in AI development, drawing parallels to his past criticisms of social media. While he advocates for safety, he stops short of calling for a complete halt to AI model deployment.
Why it matters
As AI development accelerates, industry leaders are increasingly debating the balance between rapid innovation and societal safety.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently stepped into the mounting global debate around artificial intelligence (AI) safety, calling on technology leaders to exercise ethical responsibility as high-capability models spread rapidly across global markets. His remarks arrive amid intensifying friction across Silicon Valley, spurred largely by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s 3,800-word essay demanding an industrywide slowdown in frontier model deployment to let technical safeguards catch up.According to a report by CNBC, Benioff has an established track record of pushing tech giants toward social responsibility. For years, he served as a prominent critic of big tech and social media networks, making headlines in 2018 when he declared that “Facebook is the new cigarettes” while demanding aggressive federal oversight.Avoiding making past mistakes, says BenioffSpeaking at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Benioff drew a direct parallel between the early missteps of social networking platforms and the current generative AI wave.
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