Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman Says China is No Excuse to Skip AI Regulation

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says the United States shouldn’t treat China’s rapid progress in AI as a reason to avoid AI safety measures. Speaking with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Suleyman argued that competition between the two countries should not prevent progress on safeguards for increasingly capable AI systems.

Suleyman says China’s progress in AI should not dictate US AI safety efforts

“I don’t think we should use China as the bogeyman” for not making progress on domestic AI safety efforts, Suleyman told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS. He added that if China fails to establish appropriate safety regulations, that should not mean the US follows the same path.

Suleyman also said the US and China will inevitably have areas where their AI interests intersect. Rather than focusing entirely on the rivalry, he argued that both sides could benefit from safety agreements and from learning from each other’s practices.

“We’ve just got to tone down the adversarial rhetoric,” Suleyman said, adding that AI safety will become increasingly important as the technology develops over the next several years.

His comments come shortly after Microsoft AI published a draft Humanist AI Code of Conduct for its own models. The document is designed around keeping AI systems under human control and includes requirements around correction, interruption and shutdown. Microsoft has opened the document for public feedback before a revised version is expected to guide future models.

Microsoft is pushing its own AI safety framework

Suleyman has also argued that regulation does not necessarily have to become a barrier to AI development. In the CNN interview, he described regulation as a way of creating shared standards intended to improve safety rather than automatically slowing technological progress.

The comments arrive amid a wider debate in the US over how much oversight should apply to increasingly capable AI systems. Even Satya Nadella recently called for keeping Superintelligence under human control.

For Microsoft, Suleyman’s position now sits alongside the company’s own attempt to establish rules for its AI models.