Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has urged companies to treat advanced AI models as potential insider threats, establish emergency kill switches, maintain tamper-proof activity logs, conduct independent audits and disclose security failures to strengthen AI safety, oversight and accountability.

New Delhi: Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella has urged companies deploying advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems to treat powerful models as potential insider threats, assume they could be compromised and establish emergency mechanisms to halt their operations if they behave unexpectedly.

Nadella said organisations should not rely solely on assurances from AI developers but must build safeguards that allow authorised personnel to pause or shut down AI models while they are executing tasks.

“We must assume a model is compromised and contain it from the start,” Nadella wrote in a post on X, comparing the proposed safeguard to an emergency brake that can stop a model in the middle of a task.

His remarks come amid growing concerns over the security risks associated with increasingly capable AI systems, particularly agentic models that can independently perform tasks, interact with external systems and take actions with limited human intervention.