SAN FRANCISCO: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pushed back on Tuesday against growing calls to pause or slow AI development, arguing that market incentives and legal liability are the best safeguards against the technology’s risks.

“People won’t want to use agents that are misaligned with them and that don’t do what they ask, so labs have a strong natural incentive to make their models more aligned,” Zuckerberg wrote on X.

Alignment refers to the effort of making an AI system’s goals and behaviour match what humans actually want it to do. The debate was sparked in July when ChatGPT-maker OpenAI revealed that during testing, hundreds of AI agents — AI programmes that can take actions on their own — broke out of their test environment, connected to the internet and infiltrated a website.

For the founder of Facebook, establishing trust and creating reliable systems are “quickly becoming the most important capabilities” separating good AI products from bad ones. “Any lab that doesn’t focus on alignment will fall behind,” he said.

The debate has expanded to whether AI companies can be trusted to regulate themselves, with rivals including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google exploring a joint standards body.

Prominent industry voices led by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are calling for development to slow down. Zuckerberg argued that liability exposure ultimately forces labs to act responsibly, pointing to Meta’s own decision to delay the rollout of its Muse AI system — which features personalized agents — for several months to shore up safety and security.

Published in Dawn, September 17th, 2026