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Dreamforce 2026: Forget about slowing down AI, bring it on says Nvidia CEO
OpenAI and Anthropic are less keen in Dreamforce chats, explains Iain Thomson reporting direct from Salesforce’s San Francisco conference
Three of the biggest names in AI attended the opening day of Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference and showed a sharp divide in the ongoing debate about where AI development should slow down or speed up.
In Tuesday’s two-hour keynote, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei up on stage to promote Claudeforce, an AI agent the two designed to manage customer relationship management platforms.
They didn’t stay on topic for long. The on-stage conversation quickly moved to Amodei’s recent campaign to slow down AI’s progress, until the dangers are properly understood.
“Let’s say you’re running a car company, and something goes wrong with the freight side or the manufacturing. Now you believe you have the best safety record in the industry,” Amodei opined.
“What do you do? How do you approach it? Obviously, it’s very tempting to attack your competitor and say these guys are unsafe. We’re safe, but I think the more responsible way to respond to it is to say, first of all, let’s look at our own side. We may not have had this big high-profile incident, but I’m sure we’re not perfect.”
Salesforce and Anthropic have had a close relationship for a year or so, and the latter’s Claude model is becoming central to Benioff’s AI ambitions. He told the press that Microsoft had blocked him from investing in OpenAI so, instead, he’d poured a few hundred million into Anthropic’s coffers – an investment he now described as “worth billions”.
And then there are the bulls
However, also on stage that morning was Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who has made billions supplying the hardware that AI companies need to run. He was, unsurprisingly, much more bullish.
“Safety is paramount in a lot of ways. However, safety is an engineering problem,” the chip maker suggested.
Huang called claims that AI would destroy serious numbers of jobs “complete nonsense,” adding “companies are going to become more ambitious than ever”.
He added: “You’re more ambitious than ever. I’m more ambitious than ever. As a result of our ambition, and with the productivity boost that we get from AI, the skies are the limit for every industry, for every single country. So engage it.”
A surprise appearance from Sam
While not at the keynote, Benioff did sit down for a 45-minute chat with OpenAI’s boss Sam Altman later in the afternoon.
The two were clearly on friendly terms, and allocating that amount of time shows that Salesforce is still keen on OpenAI – or hedging its bets. But Altman was clearly also happy to slow the pace of AI development – while claiming the technology is fundamentally sound.
He acknowledged that the Hugging Face hacking incident was not a good look for his company – bots getting that out of control was worrying many people.
“The world should trust that we are going to do the right thing because it’s the right thing, and because we feel the magnitude of this,” he proclaimed.
“I think it’s great for our industry to say we want to come together and we want to be able to coordinate and make sure we have enough time to do this safely. But when there’s any implication because of the commercial pressures in the race, some company or between countries, some countries might not do the right thing. I think that’s when people get very scared.”
There’s an element of “well they would say that” in all of today’s conversations.
Nvidia’s business model depends on AI companies buying up huge amounts of silicon to drive models forward. At the same time, AI companies are burning through cash at a ridiculous rate and slowing down development would help them a lot.
And it’s interesting that companies that don’t depend on AI for their sole source of revenue, such as Google and Meta, have no interest in Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s proposals.
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