Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has called for more regulation of artificial intelligence, pointing to several cases of suicide linked to the technology.
“This year, you really saw something pretty horrific, which is these AI models became suicide coaches,” Benioff told CNBC on Tuesday at the World Economic Forum’s flagship conference in Davos, Switzerland.
Salesforce has a market cap of US$206.21 billion and specialises in cloud-based software using AI.
This echoes similar comments he made in 2018, where he said social media should be treated like a health issue and platforms should be more regulated.
“Bad things were happening all over the world because social media was fully unregulated,” he said.
“Now you’re kind of seeing that play out again with artificial intelligence.”
This comes as AI regulation in the U.S. has been particularly murky, with a lack of comprehensive guardrails.
Some states, such as California and New York, have begun enacting more stringent laws. President Donald Trump has pushed back on “excessive state regulation” and signed an executive order in December to block such efforts.
“To win, United States AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation,” the order said.
Beioff said more regulation is needed to hold AI companies accountable.
“It’s funny, tech companies, they hate regulation. They hate it, except for one. They love Section 230, which basically says they’re not responsible,” Benioff said.
“So if this large language model coaches this child into suicide, they’re not responsible because of Section 230. That’s probably something that needs to get reshaped, shifted, changed.”
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects technology companies from legal liability over users’ content. Republicans and Democrats have both voiced concerns about the law.
Benioff’s comments come just weeks after Google and Character.AI settled lawsuits involving users who died by suicide after interacting with the companies’ chatbots.
