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Welcome back to AI, Tech & Money. This is Trishla Ostwal, ADWEEK’s AI reporter, writing after two very long days in San Francisco, where Salesforce threw its biggest party: Dreamforce. Gwen Stefani, Katy Perry, and Usher were on the bill.
So were OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who took to the stage to debate a more consequential question: Does AI development need to slow down?
More on that in a minute.
First, there was a little friction between Microsoft and Anthropic. Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman is taking issue with Anthropic’s approach to training Claude on questions around consciousness and welfare interests. Suleyman called for removing speculation about AI consciousness from training documents, arguing that it could make future AI systems harder for humans to control.
That puts Anthropic in an awkward position: Amodei has been among the most vocal in calling for more caution around increasingly powerful AI. Now, one of his peers is arguing that some of Anthropic’s methods could create problems of its own.
Amodei has already given us plenty to chew on before he even spoke on stage at Dreamforce. Just days before the event, he published a 3,800-word essay arguing that AI is advancing too swiftly for safety research to keep pace, and calling for independent evaluators to get permanent access to frontier models to verify companies are following their own safety commitments. Altman agreed with Amodei on X .
