Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks (NASDAQ:PANW), has a theory about all those calls to slow down AI development. It's not philosophy. It's positioning.

Arora shared his take on the ongoing debate about AI's potential threat to humanity on CNBC's "The Tech Download" podcast, recorded Tuesday and published Thursday. In his view, AI firms are trying to "get the sympathy of the regulators" and earn a "free pass" on liability. He also called the idea of pacing AI development "unrealistic."

His advice to companies: don't release products unless you're confident they're safe. He also expressed skepticism about whether companies could ever build a reliable method to monitor the pace of AI development.

As for the doomiest scenario of all, Arora isn't buying it. He dismissed the notion that AI could potentially wipe out humanity, calling it "highly unlikely" with an "extremely small" probability. What matters, he said, is building safety and security measures into AI models so they get used responsibly.

This isn't a new theme for Arora. Last week, he reacted on X to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's call for an industry-wide AI slowdown, labeling it a "Ninja Move." His argument: AI safety measures are ultimately a commercial strategy. Companies can demonstrate a "duty of care" while nudging competitors to adopt the same standards, which creates an industry-wide first line of defense.

THE PACING IS A NINJA MOVE – But be careful what you campaign for. In any competitive sport, I have seldom found people exercise restraint – they usually have a capture the flag mentality. Don't I want to be the best? The first? The only? – this is how we have been programmed. In…

— Nikesh Arora (@nikesharora) September 14, 2026

AI Safety Debate Intensifies

The debate over how fast AI should develop has been heating up. Earlier in the month, Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:PLTR), raised concerns about the politicization of AI safety, accusing a group known as the "Effective Altruists" of attempting a coup by deciding the pace of technological progress for everyone else.

Shortly after, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA), also pushed back on calls for new antitrust rules that could let AI companies coordinate a slowdown in developing increasingly powerful models. Huang called AI safety "a real thing" and argued companies should not release unsafe products.

Palo Alto Unveils AI-Powered Defense

Meanwhile, Palo Alto Networks is putting AI to work on defense. Earlier this week, the company launched a new Unit 42 service that uses AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI to continuously identify security vulnerabilities, test attack paths, and prioritize fixes.

The service, developed through six months of testing and over 100 customer engagements with a $17 million investment, uncovered a year's worth of internal security exposures in just three weeks and found exposures at every customer assessed.

Shares of Palo Alto closed 0.86% down to $389.92 on Thursday. The stock dipped about 0.24% premarket on Friday. Year-to-date, the shares have surged 111.68%, according to market data.

Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by editors.