In an interview with CNBC's David Faber, Dell said "we've always had technology that can do great things and maybe do some not-so-great things." He used the analogy of fire, noting it can heat a home or burn down a village, and concluded: "So we have to have safeguards and controls."
Dell said "there's a role for government to play" and that companies building AI tools need to set "bounded permissions." He declined to offer specifics on what that government role should look like, saying he is "not a policymaker."
The comments come as researchers and industry experts debate the catastrophic possibilities of self-improving AI models. The latest outcry was sparked by former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who quit his job and warned in a September 8 post that frontier labs were "gambling with our lives" in the race toward 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. However, the Trump administration has remained staunchly against a coordinated slowdown or other regulations.