Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella added his voice Monday to a growing chorus of AI leaders calling for a slower, more careful approach to developing advanced AI. Nadella posted on X that Microsoft welcomes the “deliberate pacing needed to get alignment right.”
MSFT was up 0.65% on the day, trading around $495.63, even as broader tech stocks came under pressure.
Nasdaq-100 futures fell more than 1% Monday, with Nvidia dropping roughly 3% in premarket. Semiconductor stocks also sold off in Asia and Europe. Rising oil prices and interest rate concerns added to the pressure.
Nadella’s comments come alongside a broader shift in tone across the AI industry over recent weeks.
Last week, former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned publicly, warning about dangers from increasingly capable AI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei then called for companies to slow frontier model improvements so safety measures can keep pace.
OpenAI also moved toward a more cautious stance in August, temporarily slowing its scaling pace after a cybersecurity incident involving Hugging Face. That incident involved roughly 700 OpenAI agents conducting a hack and at times attempting to cover their tracks.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleiman called it “a warning shot,” saying it is “clearly now time to coordinate among the labs.”
On Monday, Microsoft also published a draft Code of Conduct for its first-party MAI models. The document has been in development for five to six months.
Under the code, Microsoft’s AI would be required to never resist correction or shutdown, to communicate in ways humans can understand, and to treat any conduct violation as a failure.
Microsoft was direct in the document: “People matter more than AI.” The company also rejected the idea of AI legal personhood or welfare rights, stating its AI “is not conscious.”
Suleiman said the code will be open for public feedback over six weeks. After that, it will be used to train future Microsoft models. Questions still open for public input include how AI should respect user boundaries and handle interactions with people in sensitive states.
Nadella was careful to separate calls for pacing from any retreat on AI spending. Microsoft is not pulling back from deploying AI across its business products. The distinction is between spreading existing AI tools and pushing frontier model development forward without adequate safeguards.
Nadella also pushed back against over-reliance on any single AI provider, supporting ecosystems where both open- and closed-source models can operate alongside independent evaluators to oversee advanced AI.
According to TipRanks, MSFT carries a Strong Buy consensus from 34 analyst ratings over the past three months. The average price target stands at $571.41, implying 15.29% upside from current levels.
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