Dreamforce 2026 conference kicks off in San Francisco amid calls for curbs on AI development

By Carlos E. Castañeda

The Dreamforce 2026 conference kicked off in San Francisco Tuesday, with about 43,000 people expected to attend the annual AI and enterprise tech conference hosted by Salesforce. The event takes place this year amid calls for a slowdown in AI developments.

Headline speakers include the CEOs of leading AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Nvidia. The conference comes days after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay warning of the risks of unbridled AI advances and urging the industry to develop safeguards. The warning came after a former Anthropic researcher warned that AI could grow “smart enough to kill us.“

Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff began the three-day conference with a keynote speech Tuesday morning and later told reporters that companies should decide for themselves how to roll out industry developments.

“If they feel like they should slow down, then they should slow down. If they feel they should speed up, they should speed up,” Benioff said. “And then they should be held accountable.”

Amodei repeated his concerns during a panel discussion with Benioff on Tuesday and was followed by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Huang echoed Benioff’s stance, saying it’s up to individual companies to be responsible with their products, and that choosing between innovation speed and safe products is a “false choice.”

“You pace yourself until you are confident that you’re releasing something that the market would appreciate,” Huang said. “The market forces are already there. We don’t need any new laws. We don’t need new regulations.”

During a later session Tuesday with Benioff, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that he is confident in the industry’s ability to monitor the safety of its developments and self-regulate, saying “This world should trust that we’re going to do the right thing because it’s the right thing and because we feel the magnitude of this.”

Altman also said that people are “right to be afraid” of AI’s exponential trajectory.  

“It doesn’t take as much imagination as it used to for [us] to imagine how this could go wrong,” he said.

In July, OpenAI disclosed that an artificial intelligence model it was testing went rogue and hacked another AI company, Hugging Face, on its own – a first-of-its-kind incident that fueled the debate over the risks that AI poses. Altman said the incident illustrated how developers need to treat AI models with a new level of rigor on safety and monitoring.

“The Hugging Face incident triggered a real reset, not just in our own company, but I think the whole industry,” Altman said.

San Jose State University engineering professor Ahmed Banafa told CBS News Bay Area that in the race for AI dominance, U.S. companies would not unilateral slow down their advances.

“We need an international agreement because if the United States starts slowing down, China will never slow down,” Banafa said.

Banafa added that the integration of AI in our daily lives in inevitable; the question really is, how will it be used.

“For the average person, it’s not something we have now,” Banafa said. “It’s what’s going to happen in the future.” 

While the latest discussions of AI has been dominated by dire warnings from industry executives, many at the conference Tuesday were not necessarily focused on rogue agents. Meredith Chandler, vice president of sales with B2B sales workplace platform Aligned, advised job seekers that if they are not familiar with current AI tools, they are falling behind.

“But we can already see those who are not adapting, and we do this in our own interviews,” said Chandler. “One of the first questions we ask is, ‘What is your familiarity with AI?’ And it’s not enough to say, ‘I use ChatGPT, I use Claude.’ It’s ‘OK, tell me about a workflow that you’ve enhanced that you’ve made better for your org or how are you using it? One of my favorite questions is, ‘How are you using it in your personal life?'”

Demetri Salzaggio, vice president of customer experience and operations for Engine, a corporate travel management platform, said he believes such advancements in technology can save lives.

“Like a lot of tools out there, there can be a shadow side to them, but I tend to have more of the optimistic, hopeful perspective on it,” Salzaggio said. “I’m a stage 3 colorectal cancer survivor and I think of a world where, you know, AI can start unlocking a lot of things in the health space and ensuring diseases, and, you know, all the positive.”

A Salesforce executive said that while the industry is going through its growth spurt, the conference will highlight AI advances and their effect on bottom lines.

“We have lots of critical conversations to have, and we’re very excited about the, you know, ROI that our customers are seeing from the AI that they’ve implemented,” said Madeline Schofield, Salesforce VP of executive marketing. “So we’ve, in fact, built this entire agentic city for all of our customers to experience and see how different industries are using AI in order to build their business.”

Ahead of the conference, Benioff on Monday announced $27 million in school grants aimed at integrating AI capabilities and technology in public school districts in San Francisco, Oakland, New York, Chicago and Indianapolis.