Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg blasted the “centralization” of AI in the hands of a few powerful companies and voiced opposition to potential bans on Chinese AI models as he hailed open access to the new tech as a way to unlock prosperity.
Writing in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Zuck said he is surprised by how much of the discourse around AI “is so filled with doom,” arguing that humans are “fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history.”
“I don’t understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity’s relevance would rush to build that future,” wrote Zuckerberg, in an apparent swipe at OpenAI and Anthropic execs who have warned of mass job displacement.
“The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems dangerous,” he added. “Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened hasn’t led to safe or positive outcomes.”
The Trump administration is reportedly finalizing an executive order calling on tech giants to submit to a voluntary 30-day review period on new AI models after an OpenAI hacking incident and an ultra-powerful new Anthropic model raised cybersecurity concerns.
In an interview with the Journal, Zuckerberg acknowledged that “There are new issues that we need to think through,” but insisted that “distributing the technology seems like it is creating more value than harm by quite a margin on all these fronts.”
“I think saying, ‘Hey, we want to review stuff for’ – whatever it is – 30 or 60 days, it may not sound like that much,” he said. “But the field is moving so quickly, that actually is quite a meaningful amount of time.”
US government officials are reportedly also considering restricting American companies from accessing Chinese AI models, after a top White House tech official accused China’s Moonshot AI of stealing from Anthropic to help create its latest Kimi K3 release.
On Tuesday, the FCC announced a new ban on Chinese humanoid robots over national security risks. The White House claimed “malign actors” could be using the robotic devices to “surveil Americans” or collect other data.
But Zuckerberg said he doubted “banning open-source models from different countries is going to be productive,” arguing that policymakers should instead focus on accelerating AI advancements at home.
His company’s chief AI scientist, Shengjia Zhao, joined executives from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and other top tech companies in a Tuesday letter urging the US government to help develop safeguards “needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”
Meta has leaned into its “superintelligence” efforts, a term it uses to describe AI that is smarter than humans – planning to spend as much as $145 billion this year to buy pricey memory chips and build massive data centers.
But Meta is still trailing behind OpenAI and Anthropic’s dominant ChatGPT and Claude bots – and federal restrictions on new AI model launches could potentially keep Zuck behind his rivals.
The company laid off 8,000 employees in May as part of a cost-cutting initiative related to its AI spending, but Meta later announced plans to launch a workforce training program for people to build out data centers.
“So far, I think that all the work around AI has net created a lot of jobs because there’s all this infrastructure that needs to get created,” Zuckerberg said. “So that concern hasn’t exactly played out the way that people feared it might.”
That’s consistent with arguments from other AI proponents, who say the new tech might temporarily displace workers, but it will also create new jobs in the long-term.
Since 2023, when AI first emerged as a driving force in layoffs, the new tech has been cited in 173,568 job cut announcements, according to a June report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. So far this year, it has repeatedly come in as the leading reason for layoffs.
The labor market has remained surprisingly resilient this year amid shocks from President Trump’s tariffs and the war in Iran – though the pace of hiring has slowed and the number of long-term unemployed people remains high, particularly impacting early-career workers.
Zuckerberg argued that AI’s impact on the job market is again related to its availability, arguing that if the tech is made widely accessible, “then I believe we will see more jobs in the future, not fewer,” particularly more entrepreneurs starting their own small businesses.
News Corp, which owns The Post and The Wall Street Journal, has a content partnership with Meta.