Cautious optimism on AI an obligation: Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton emphasises the need for cautious optimism and a slowdown in AI development due to potential human impact concerns.

It is an obligation to ask for growth in artificial intelligence (AI) to slow down if the people who run the big companies are not sure of the human impact of the technical advances, said Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Speaking at the Mumbai Climate Week on Wednesday (February 18, 2026), she said, “I think we would be naive not to recognise the potential threats that AI and its development are causing. I mean, we even hear from the people who run these big companies, and they don’t have any idea what is going to happen. They don’t know how these technical advances are going to impact humanity. So, if the people creating them don’t know, then we have an obligation to say, let’s slow down and figure out how we’re going to manage this.”

She said that the most advanced development other than AI chat agents has been in health.

“We’ve seen some really exciting ways that AI cannot just having aggregated information but also analyse it and provide in real time advice to physicians and other health practitioners. I’m very excited about that. But I think we would be naive not to recognise the potential threats that AI and its development are causing,” she said.