OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that she’s not concerned about the possibility of AI agents using weapons of mass destruction to kill people, but said, “We need to take safety seriously.”
“And if that means we have to slow down and slow down the frontier, absolutely, we will listen to the researchers and do that,” she said.
“As a CFO, I have to make business decisions based on that,” she added. “We are stepping into that frontier and taking safety and collaboration seriously.”
Tune into “Mad Money” tonight at 6pm to see the full interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer and OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar. Watch in real time on CNBC+ or CNBC Pro streams.
Friar’s comments come as the debate over the safety of artificial intelligence has exploded over the past week. human He quit his job and warned that rapidly evolving technology could “wipe out humanity by the end of the decade.”
In the days since, concerns about AI’s ability to cause harm have reached a fever pitch both in and outside of Washington, with Humanity Provost Dario Amodei saying: space x Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agrees with calls for an industry-wide slowdown.
Amodei wrote a blog post on Saturday arguing that the development of AI models should be slowed to “reduce the risk of something seriously going wrong.”
However, it remains unclear whether the new safety concerns will affect the timeline for Frontier Labs’ initial public offering. Anthropic’s debut was widely expected to occur sometime next month. In an interview with Fortune magazine published Saturday, Altman said a 2026 IPO would be “unwise.”
CNBC reported in August that Friar told employees the institute would “become a publicly traded company in 2027,” but could debut sooner “if our business continues to grow.”
