Mustafa Suleyman, head of Microsoft AI, has warned that uncontrolled AI development risks creating what he called “a new silicon species” which would “no doubt compete with us for resources, no matter how much it cares about humanity and loves us.”
BBC News reports that speaking to BBC’s Today program in an interview on Thursday, Suleyman said tech firms building increasingly autonomous AI systems are “essentially seeding a new silicon species.” Asked whether the public was right to be concerned about the direction of AI development, he replied simply, “right,” before adding that there are “very practical things that we can do” to keep the technology under control. Suleyman went further, calling Anthropic’s approach “misguided.”
Suleyman argued that AI systems should never be allowed to set their own objectives, earn money or own assets. A system given too much autonomy would, he said, “no doubt compete with us for resources, no matter how much it cares about humanity and loves us.”
His comments follow an essay he published earlier in the week that took aim at Anthropic’s approach to training its Claude model. In it, Suleyman called Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei and his team “intellectually honest people,” even as he criticized the company for treating Claude as if it had human-like qualities such as desires, values and a sense of self. He wrote plainly: “AIs are not conscious.” He continued, “They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations.” Such systems, he wrote, are “sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by humans.”
Suleyman called for greater transparency around how AI systems are trained and evaluated, including independent scrutiny and stronger tools for monitoring and control. In his essay, he cautioned: “We must not sleepwalk our way into a decision we later come to bitterly regret.”
Suleyman also used the interview to press for global “alignment” ahead of an upcoming AI summit. Alignment, in this context, means embedding human ethical principles into AI systems so they stay “subordinate” to humanity rather than operating independently of it. “I think that the good news here is that everybody who is human is going to have a very strong interest in making sure that the systems that we all create and… are used around the world in every nation are safe and controllable and subordinate to humanity,” he said. “Everybody must be aligned.”
The remarks arrive as Microsoft formalizes its own stance on AI safety. The company founded a dedicated superintelligence team in October 2025, and on Monday it published a training manual titled the “Humanist AI Code of Conduct,” introducing the concept of “humanist superintelligence”: AI defined as “very advanced AI that always works for people, stays within limits, and remains under human control.”
Battle lines are being drawn to determine the future of AI. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at BBC News here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.