Japan’s richest man Masayoshi Son, who sold all his stake in the world’s most-valuable company, to fund Sam Altman’s OpenAI is now worried, and has a ‘request’

Japan’s richest man and SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son, long regarded as one of artificial intelligence’s most vocal champions, has reportedly voiced sharp concern over the safety risks posed by rapidly advancing machines. According to a report by Bloomberg, speaking on the sidelines of the Science and Technology in Society forum in Kyoto, the Japanese billionaire warned that the exponential leap in AI capabilities leaves nations no choice but to foster mutual trust and govern the technology cooperatively.Son shared the stage with White House science and technology policy advisor Michael Kratsios, who unveiled a 17-nation initiative led by the United States aimed at deploying AI to speed up scientific discovery. Delegates from countries including Japan, South Korea, the UK, Germany, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates appeared alongside Kratsios to endorse the pact. China was not among the initial signatories to the White House statement.

Masayoshi Son’s ‘rare warning’ on the technology he has spent billions on

“We don’t have any more luxury of having human fight against humans,” Son said, emphasizing that countries must align to counter the far larger risks emerging from ultra-powerful systems. He warned that superintelligence landing in the wrong hands could quickly turn “super dangerous.”Son’s uncharacteristic caution comes amid escalating alarm following a string of security breaches linked to AI models in recent months, Bloomberg reported. The 69-year-old executive, who has steered roughly $65 billion of SoftBank capital into ChatGPT maker OpenAI, has historically championed the technology’s promise to uplift humanity while generating outsized returns. It has become one of the world’s biggest backers of OpenAI under founder Son’s push to make ⁠the Japanese conglomerate a dominant investor in AI.Son warned that the speed of progress will only accelerate. The underlying models driving today’s chatbots—increasingly deployed to browse the web and write software using vast clusters of general-purpose chips—are poised to enter a third phase, enabling robots and machinery to interface directly with the physical world as soon as next year.

When SoftBank sold its entire stake in Nvidia to fund OpenAI

In November 2025, SoftBank announced that it has sold its entire stake in the US chipmaker Nvidia as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize on its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI. A month earlier in 2025, SoftBank sold 32.1 million shares of Nvidia. The company also sold part of its stake in T-Mobile for $9.17 billion to fund Sam Altman’s company.

SoftBank makes final $30 billion payment to OpenAI

Last week, October 2026, SoftBank Group said that it has completed its $30 billion investment in ​OpenAI as part of its commitment ‌to the ChatGPT maker’s last fundraising round. Earlier this year, OpenAI ​had secured $122 billion in commitments that ​valued the Sam Altman-led company at $852 ⁠billion.