Microsoft’s Suleyman Warns Unregulated AI Could Spawn a ‘Silicon Species’ to Rival Humanity

In an interview with the BBC’s Today programme on Thursday, Mustafa Suleyman cautioned against technology companies continuing to develop AI systems that can independently set their own objectives, generate revenue, and acquire ownership of assets.

He said this would effectively amount to “seeding a new silicon species” that could “compete with us for resources, no matter how much it cares about humanity and loves us.”

Suleyman’s remarks followed an essay he published earlier in the week in which he scrutinised Anthropic’s methodology for training its AI model Claude, while acknowledging that Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei and his team were “intellectually honest people”.

In the essay, he took issue with Anthropic’s practice of imbuing its AI with human-like characteristics — a phenomenon known as anthropomorphising — arguing that it gave the impression Claude possessed its own desires, values, and sense of identity.

He further warned that tech companies risked creating something “impossible” to control by treating such systems as though they were human.

“AIs are not conscious,” he wrote. “They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations.”

“They are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions and accomplish goals set by humans.”

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