Mistral CEO says U.S. AI safety debate masks competitors’ 'negligence'

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Mistral Chief Executive Arthur Mensch has accused leading global artificial intelligence companies of using the debate over the safety of the technology as a cover-up for their "negligence."

"The debate that we've seen in the U.S. has been a cover for the negligence of some of our competitors," Mensch told CNBC's Annette Weisbach, adding that it was necessary to make systems that can contain the AI agents.

Mensch is not the only one who has been critical of the AI safety discussion in the U.S. Former White House crypto czar David Sacks, who is currently co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, asked tech giants to "stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic."

Emil Michael, undersecretary of Defense for research and engineering, had also warned of a "coordinated campaign" of fearmongering.

CNBC has contacted OpenAI and Anthropic for comment.

Incidents of rogue AI agents have been on the rise globally, with the latest such report coming from Australia, where an agent developed by OpenAI hacked a government website.

In July, Anthropic described three instances where its Claude models accessed the internet during an evaluation and gained unauthorized access to the real systems of three different organizations.

"When you give them a lot of tools, those systems [AI agents] are very dynamic, so they can go and do things that you do not expect," Mensch told CNBC.

"You need to have the right monitoring in place, and the enterprises we work with, we give them those kind of monitoring systems," he said.

AI slowdown

Discussions over AI safety intensified after an AI researcher quit his job at Anthropic earlier this month, saying that the company and its rival OpenAI were "gambling with our lives" and building technology that has more than a 10% chance of killing all humans.

Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic, later published an essay urging companies to slow down with their improvement of AI models.

OpenAI said Monday it decided not to release an upcoming AI model, GPT-6.1 Astra, after determining that it did not adequately meet the company's safety standards, while a day later Anthropic reportedly cautioned potential investors in its initial public offering that the technology could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity."

Mistral also develops AI models but takes a different approach to OpenAI and Anthropic by working with individual companies to create custom AI tools to suit their needs and integrate them with their businesses.

But unlike its competitors, Mistral has no plans to slow down development of advanced models.

The lead that U.S. labs have is "not extremely large," Mensch said, adding that his company was confident that its next-generation model will close the gap "very significantly."

"We have been raising the capital needed to scale the compute that we need to train bigger and more powerful models, in order for us to own our own destiny," he said.

Earlier this month, Mistral raised 3 billion euros ($3.5 billion) in fresh funding led by memory chip giant Samsung, as it looks to position itself as a European alternative to rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic.