Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella criticized the way the AI race has been unfolding, saying people won't tolerate a sort of oligarchy where a few companies concentrate most of the power.
"You can't say, hey, all white-collar jobs are gone and this could even be a weapon and we will use all the power to build data centers," Nadella told The Wall Street Journal in an interview.
He went on to say that people won't tolerate a scenario where a few, powerful companies do "all the learning for the world."
The outlet noted that Microsoft has released low-cost models aimed at driving prices down as they increase elsewhere. It is also reportedly considering hosting a version of low-cost China-based DeepSeek, which other large companies have called out for copying their main models.
The WSJ said Microsoft has trailed other large companies in developing its own AI models, noting that late last year subscribers of Copilot largely preferred other options, including Google's Gemini.
Elsewhere in the interview, Nadella criticized those saying that the rise of AI will lead to massive job losses. "No, how about we think about reorganizing the jobs?" he said. Yes, it's a lot of change management, it's a lot of displacement, but there is a path," Nadella added, calling for companies to give a "recipe for how that can be done." "We now have to do the hard work in earning the social permission," he concluded.
Nadella appeared to be making reference to remarks from top AI executives, who have been claiming that the disruption caused by AI will fundamentally change how the world works. One of them is Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who recently published a policy essay confronting what he describes as a deepening mismatch between the breakneck pace of advanced artificial intelligence development and the slow pace of policymaking.
The central argument of the essay, titled "Policy on the AI Exponential," is that the technology's capability is scaling so rapidly that existing regulatory frameworks are too slow and too fragmented to meaningfully shape its safe deployment. "AI is progressing extremely fast — much faster than the policy process was built to handle," he wrote.
Amodei went on to emphasize that voluntary transparency measures, once sufficient when AI risks were theoretical, no longer provide meaningful protection. "Anthropic has long advocated for transparency requirements for frontier AI, because the risks weren't yet clear enough to regulate precisely. That is no longer sufficient."
He added that frontier AI models are approaching what he described as the "end of the exponential," a point where capability growth could rapidly outstrip human understanding and societal preparedness. "The most surprising thing has been the lack of public recognition of how close we are to the end of the exponential."
In this context, a survey showed that a growing majority of workers around the world are worried about their job security because of the rise of artificial intelligence despite historically low unemployment rates and steady economic growth.
ADP's latest Today at Work 2026 report found that only 22% of workers globally strongly agree with the claim that their job is safe from elimination, meaning more than three-quarters of the global workforce harbor concerns about their long-term employment prospects.
