Michael Dell says AI needs safeguards and controls, and government has a role to play

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Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell said that artificial intelligence models "have to have safeguards and controls" as the debate rages on over the threats the rapidly evolving technology could pose to humans.
"I think we've always had technology that can do great things and maybe do some not-so-great things. You know, fire can heat your home. It can also burn down your whole village. So that's not good. So we have to have safeguards and controls," Dell told CNBC's David Faber in an interview Tuesday.
Dell said "there's a role for government to play" and that the companies building AI tools need to also set "bounded permissions."
He declined to give specifics about what that government role could look like, only saying he's "not a policymaker."
In recent weeks, researchers and industry experts have debated the catastrophic possibilities that could come from self-improving AI models. The outcry was sparked by former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who quit his job and warned in a Sept. 8 post that frontier labs were "gambling with our lives" in the race towards superintelligence.
Since then, tech CEOs, including Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman, have endorsed calls for more regulation and an industry-wide slowdown in frontier model development. But the Trump administration has remained staunchly against a coordinated slowdown or other regulations.
President Donald Trump hosted a lunch on Sept. 29 with AI leaders that ended with executives signing a "morally binding" document to self-regulate their products' safety with the help of outside evaluators.
The White House document has made any further federal-level regulation unlikely ahead of November's midterm election, which is only weeks away. The backlash against AI and the data center build-out has reached a fever pitch and is a key issue that could help decide which party controls Congress in the final two years of Trump's term.
Dell also addressed the rise in opposition to data centers and said the more active discussion about them was "a good thing."
"We talk to our customers about it and hear what they're doing to address it, and certainly there are things we can do to make the systems more efficient, to reduce the energy consumption," Dell said. "So we're all working together to address this. I don't see it as a big impediment to 2027."

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