Microsoft's Nadella says AI needs an ‘emergency brake’ that humans control

Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., during an event in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026. David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesMicrosoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella on Saturday called for advanced artificial intelligence systems to be built with containment, independent controls and an "emergency brake" that lets authorized people pause or shut a model down mid-task."We need to surround non-deterministic models with strong, deterministic system design, human controls, and reliable operating procedures, and establish industry standards where existing ones are insufficient," Nadella wrote in a post on social media platform X."Treating frontier closed and open weight models like insider risks is a way to build such a system," he said. Nadella's comments come amid warnings from top tech executives and researchers — including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — about insufficient AI safety protocols and claims that the technology is moving too fast. An AI researcher quit Anthropic last month and accused the company, and its chief rival, OpenAI, of "gambling ...