ANZ CEO warns of AI risks and job cuts after Musk, Altman alert

ANZ Group chief executive officer Nuno Matos has warned about the rising, unpredictable risks linked to artificial intelligence and failed to rule out large-scale job cuts at the bank as it adopts the quickly emerging technology.

“At this point in time, it’s creating risks at a much higher pace than what their own builders and developers were thinking,” Matos said at the Australian Financial Review Asia Summit on Tuesday (Sep 15) in Sydney.

“The fact that you see Musk, Dario and Sam saying that they think they have to pull down the pace, it should tell us something very clear,” he said, referring to Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic PBC, and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

The three AI leaders have in the past few days warned about the risks of rapid AI development and even floated a slowing of the pace of model development, drawing a rebuke from President Donald Trump.

“They are saying that the risk of this technology is well above what they expected,” Matos said.

“We all had this dream that AI would come to improve our lives, increase our capacities and capabilities, find cures to many diseases — and that’s true,” he said. But without “enough guardrails and limitations,” it will also lead to dangerous outcomes, he said. “It’ll attack infrastructure,” Matos said.

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The bank boss warned about the potentially destabilising impact of AI adoption on society should mass job losses emerge, and didn’t rule out the possibility of sweeping cuts at ANZ due to the AI. Melbourne-based ANZ has around 40,000 staff. 

“I don’t know and I think whoever says something that is certain will lie to you — you don’t know,” said Matos. “Nobody knows.” BLOOMBERG