Nadella: AI Must Stay Under Human Control, Backs Third-Party Testing
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella issued an internal memo on the evening of September 14, sharing his views on whether the AI industry is moving too fast. He said AI must remain under human control and expressed support for broader third-party testing, warning that companies need to take enough time to ensure safety as risks rise. "Otherwise, you will lose your operating license anyway," he wrote.
His remarks came after a week of intense debate over AI risks. AI researchers had warned that the technology could pose extreme dangers. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed slowing AI development and allowing external monitoring of his company's models, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agreed with third-party monitoring and backed slowing deployment if necessary to ensure alignment and safety. Microsoft also released a 37-page draft of "humanistic" AI model behavior guidelines on September 14. Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman said, "What we have worried about theoretically for a long time has become very real."
In the memo, Nadella outlined three priorities. First, AI must remain under human control and broadly benefit society, creating an ecosystem where both open-source and closed-source models can thrive while adjusting direction with caution. He stressed that having more external or third-party testers is a good thing. Second, for customers, it is critical to ensure they control their own unique and tacit knowledge, enabling them to build continuous learning loops without depending on any single model provider. The Foundry platform, he noted, makes long-running agents enterprise-ready with built-in safety, guardrails and FinOps. Third, Microsoft must make sure local residents can tangibly benefit from infrastructure construction to gain permission to build such infrastructure, citing the Quincy data center as an example of long-term growth with the community.
Nadella said these efforts span three layers: how to build at the frontier, how to keep customers in control, and how to ensure economic benefits spread broadly to communities and countries.
