Amid the raging debate on artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on humans, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that the development of frontier artificial intelligence must be guided by the principle that it should help humanity and remain under human control.

Joining other tech leaders calling for a "deliberate" pace in the development of AI, he said on X that “Any pursuit of superintelligence has to be grounded in the core principle that if the AI we build is not helping humanity and under human control, it's not worth pursuing”.

Nadella said firms should be able to retain control over their “unique and tacit knowledge” and build continuous learning systems without becoming dependent on a single AI provider.

His comments followed tech leaders such as Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Elon Musk calling for a global slowdown in development of advanced models.

"We also need to accelerate and spread the benefits of AI, such that they are diffused broadly across countries, communities, and companies. This requires a frontier ecosystem in which both closed and open-source models can thrive," he said.

He welcomed research and “deliberate pacing” to ensure alignment is “right as the design goal” and backed measures such as “embedded evaluators” and the broader efforts to develop the necessary mechanisms.

Nadella reminded that the advanced capabilities “cannot be controlled by a handful of entities, but must have broad representation across the ecosystem, countries, and fields, including academia.”

Microsoft is prioritising “broad access and choice at every layer of the AI stack; enterprise control of learning loops and models; and the “Code of Conduct” that underlies our own first party MAI models that we’ll publish tomorrow for public consultation,” he added.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, earlier in September, warned that advances in AI could outpace efforts to understand and control the technology.