In the debate over whether AI should slow down, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has offered a very different answer from most of his peers: no slowdown — let the market work. On September 15, Zuckerberg posted on X, publicly rejecting the coordinated deceleration proposed by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei — a proposal already endorsed by OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
Zuckerberg's core argument: competition and legal liability already give every lab enough incentive to act safely. "Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely," he wrote. "Users won't use misaligned agents, and labs face significant liability risk — trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate agents and models. Any lab that doesn't focus on alignment will fall behind." He also cited Meta's own example: the company delayed shipping its AI agent Muse to strengthen security — proof, he argued, that market incentives naturally drive safe behavior.
That doesn't mean Zuckerberg opposes all oversight. He explicitly backs the mechanism of "independent third-party evaluators" — external bodies supervising labs' safety practices — as more testable and less administratively costly than an "industry-wide deceleration pact." The real divide is about testability: Amodei favors pause thresholds and capability ceilings; Zuckerberg favors keeping training on pace, with evaluators granted access and veto power. One is "hitting the brakes," the other "installing airbags."
Zuckerberg's stance puts him in the same camp as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang — both oppose coordinated deceleration, though for different reasons: Huang fears harming US AI competitiveness, while Zuckerberg stresses the efficacy of market mechanisms. Meanwhile, the leaders of OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX AI advocate more cautious industry coordination. The split draws two clear governance routes: pact or competition? government coordination or independent evaluation?
For Meta, the statement also carries commercial weight: as a champion of open source, Zuckerberg has long resisted the narrative of "closed giants building walls in the name of safety." In his view, what truly constrains AI is not industry consortiums but user choice and market pressure — a stance consistent with his long-standing advocacy for open models. The slowdown debate is far from over, but Zuckerberg has placed Meta's chips on the "accelerate, but supervised" side.