Masayoshi Son issued an unusual warning regarding artificial intelligence safety at the Science and Technology in Society forum in Kyoto on October 4, 2026, urging international cooperation. The caution from SoftBank’s chief coincides with a U.S.-led research initiative and follows steep stock declines driven by financing pressures and debate over development pace.
Son Warns of Artificial Intelligence Safety in Kyoto
SoftBank Group Chief Executive Masayoshi Son voiced strong concerns over artificial intelligence safety during an event on the sidelines of the Science and Technology in Society forum in Kyoto on Sunday, October 4, 2026.
The public caution represents a major change for an investor who has spent years championing unbridled technological expansion. Son pointed to recent security breaches linked to advanced models and warned that superintelligence could turn dangerous if it falls into irresponsible hands.
We no longer have the luxury of humans fighting among each other.
Masayoshi Son, Chief Executive, SoftBank Group
Ahead of these events, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spent a weekend urging the industry to slow the pace of frontier development. At SoftBank’s annual meeting in June, Son had dismissed bubble talk as blasphemy against AI,
and a month later told an audience that questioning whether AI is a bubble is a foolish question,
projecting $5 trillion in annual global investment by 2040.
Seventeen Nations Launch Scientific Initiative
While Son addressed safety risks, Kratsios used the same venue to unveil a multilateral coalition aimed at accelerating scientific research using automated systems. The U.S.-led initiative brings together 17 countries, including Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Germany, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates. China was not among the initial signatories to the White House statement.
The participating governments plan to deploy industrial-scale cloud laboratories where robotic systems can execute hundreds of simultaneous experiments, generating data to feed real-time analysis and refine hypotheses.
SoftBank Shares Drop as Market Scrutinizes Debt
The safety debate unfolds as SoftBank faces severe market scrutiny over its heavy debt load and immense exposure to OpenAI.
Market reaction to calls by tech leaders to slow frontier development has hit SoftBank harder than hardware suppliers. SoftBank shares dropped as much as 13% in Tokyo during mid-September trading, marking the steepest single-day decline in nearly three months and driving credit default swaps to their highest levels since 2023. Son’s own assets fell more than $8 billion in a single day, while other compute-demand names like TSMC dipped barely 1%, Kioxia and SK Hynix fell further, and Nvidia shed about 8% on the week.
With Altman confirming that OpenAI will not pursue an initial public offering in 2026 and calling a public listing this year ill-advised due to safety considerations, Yugo Tsuboi, chief strategist at Daiwa Securities, noted concerns that OpenAI’s value might not be as high as previously expected. This pushes SoftBank’s exit out, leaving the firm to pay to hold the position while debt obligations and financing costs continue to mount.
