Elon Musk experienced a week of contradictory alliances, advocating for AI safety and urging a slower development pace alongside rivals Dario Amodei and Sam Altman, only to be challenged by Donald Trump and Jensen Huang who pushed for faster innovation. This reflects Musk’s long-standing, often inconsistent stance on AI, simultaneously warning of its dangers while heavily investing in and fighting against its regulation for his ventures like SpaceX and Tesla. The debate highlights growing skepticism among lawmakers and experts about the industry’s ability to self-police AI development.
Elon Musk navigated a truly bewildering week in the world of Artificial Intelligence. After aligning with former adversaries Dario Amodei of Anthropic and OpenAI's Sam Altman in their call for a measured pace in foundational AI model development, Musk soon found himself at odds with unexpected figures: former President Donald Trump and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, both of whom argued for accelerating AI progress.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk addresses members of the media during a press conference announcing new developments of the Crew Dragon reusable spacecraft, at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, Oct. 10, 2019.
Philip Pacheco | Afp | Getty Images
Trump, whose investment portfolio includes shares in Nvidia and SpaceX according to his latest disclosure, notably dismissed widespread concerns about runaway AI as a mere 'hoax.' Meanwhile, during a panel discussion at the All-In Summit, Musk adopted a more moderate stance. Alongside long-time friend and former White House AI czar David Sacks, he advocated for companies to rigorously test each other's new models to pinpoint and rectify safety flaws before public release. Musk presented this as a preferable alternative to what he termed 'heavy-handed' government regulation.
"You can always escalate the amount of regulatory oversight, but it is very difficult to reduce it," Musk stated virtually at the event. "It does tend to be very much a one-way ratchet."
Behind the scenes, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk had joined forces with Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in advising former President Trump to oppose an industry-funded regulatory body.
Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding this story.
This whirlwind week epitomizes Musk's complex and often contradictory history in artificial intelligence, a journey that began with his early investment in DeepMind, later acquired by Google. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI with Altman and others, initially as a nonprofit research lab.
While Musk has consistently voiced contentious and often inconsistent opinions on AI, a path that has strained relationships with figures like Google co-founder Larry Page and Altman, the current stakes are unprecedented. AI developers are rapidly deploying technologies that lead industry insiders to raise alarms about potential existential threats, while tech giants pour hundreds of billions annually into the infrastructure powering this revolution.
Musk’s empire is deeply embedded in this technological surge. His AI startup, xAI, merged with SpaceX in February. SpaceX also completed a $60 billion acquisition of AI coding tools provider Cursor in August. Between these events, SpaceX’s record-breaking IPO briefly elevated Musk to trillionaire status. Concurrently, Tesla, his other public company, continues its work on 'physical AI,' encompassing driverless vehicles and humanoid robots.
"Tesla is arguably the world's biggest robotics company," Musk claimed at Tesla's "AI Day" in 2021. "Because our cars are semi-sentient robots on wheels."
'Some scary outcomes'
From the early days of his involvement in AI, Musk has simultaneously stoked public anxieties about the 'world-ending' potential of AI superintelligence while actively building his own AI ventures and resisting regulation. In a 2014 interview with CNBC's "Closing Bell," he remarked, "I like to just keep an eye on what's going on with artificial intelligence," adding, "There have been movies about this, you know, like '[The] Terminator.' There are some scary outcomes."
This campaign, blending fear with optimism, is a strategy detailed in a March 2024 paper by AI ethics and computer science researchers Timnit Gebru and Emile Torres. The paper, which references Musk over 30 times, concludes that he and a select group of AI elites purport to be "safeguarding humanity's future, while simultaneously creating unsafe products, centralizing power, and evading accountability," often disproportionately harming marginalized communities.
In late 2014, Musk likened AI development to "summoning the demon" during a talk at MIT. Around that period, he donated $10 million through his foundation to establish the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a nonprofit led by MIT researcher Max Tegmark, dedicated to raising awareness of AI's terrifying potential and guiding the technology away from human extinction. At the 2015 Effective Altruism conference, Musk declared the threat of AI spinning out of human control as the greatest existential risk he could imagine. He subsequently signed an FLI open letter advocating for a "pause AI."
Elon Musk arrives at federal court in Oakland, Calif., on April 30, 2026. He invested in OpenAI early on, believing it would be a non-profit, but is now suing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman for allegedly deceiving him by developing OpenAI into a for-profit company.
Benjamin Fanjoy | Getty Images
That same year, Musk co-founded OpenAI with the stated mission to "advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." His significant rift with Altman emerged in 2018 when Musk reportedly pressured his OpenAI co-founders for control of the lab, proposing it become a for-profit subsidiary of Tesla. Musk then recruited key talent from OpenAI for Tesla and resigned from the organization's board that year.
It took another four years for the full impact of that split to materialize. In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, igniting the generative AI boom, with Musk largely on the sidelines. Months later, in March 2023, Musk signed another "pause AI letter" from FLI, asserting: "AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research and acknowledged by top AI labs." Around this time, Musk was secretly incorporating his new AI venture, xAI, in Nevada, keeping it under wraps from Tesla investors and the public until July.
Musk v. Altman
The legal battle with Altman soon followed. In August 2024, Musk sued OpenAI and its co-founders, alleging they violated a promise to maintain the lab as a nonprofit. Musk lost the high-profile California trial in May, with a jury and federal judge ruling his claims were filed beyond the statute of limitations. He stated his intention to appeal, though no appeal has yet been filed.
Correspondence revealed during the case highlighted that Musk's initial drive to create OpenAI was fueled by fears that Google would dominate AI after acquiring DeepMind, even as he and Altman publicly championed the altruistic aspects of their mission. Now, Musk is once again emphasizing safety. Following Amodei's recent essay urging the industry to "pace the frontier," Musk posted on X, "Dario is right."
This sentiment stands in stark contrast to February, when Musk publicly called Anthropic "misanthropic and evil" and accused it of hating "Western civilization." The tone dramatically shifted in May, when Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX up to $1.25 billion a month to lease computing infrastructure in Memphis, providing Musk’s company a substantial boost of much-needed AI revenue before SpaceX's IPO. "I was clearly wrong about Anthropic," Musk wrote on X in July. "They are obviously currently the leader in AI."
Gas turbines are visible at an xAI data center on Riverport Rd in Memphis, TN on April 25, 2025.
Brandon Dill | The Washington Post | Getty Images
Musk’s recent track record on AI safety has been turbulent. He has established data centers in and around Memphis, Tennessee, while facing lawsuits from local residents impacted by air and noise pollution. At SpaceXAI (formerly xAI), Musk sold Grok models to the U.S. military, which, according to DOJ legal filings, "enabled U.S. forces to deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours."
Furthermore, xAI, under Musk, has sued to block state regulations that would ban Grok's "nudify" features in Minnesota and mandate transparency about the data used to train its models in California.
As Musk and his counterparts debate the optimal approach to AI safety, and the extent of government involvement, lawmakers and independent researchers are increasingly questioning the industry's capacity for self-regulation. Tyler Whitmer, CEO of the nonprofit Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology (LASST), emphasized that self-regulation alone is insufficient to safeguard the public from current and future harms posed by AI systems.
"We need real regulation that creates a level playing field for companies but also protects the public, and the companies just can't do that themselves," Whitmer asserted. "There needs to be a government-enforceable requirement that third-party evaluators be involved, not just the companies themselves."
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Source: CNBC Technology
