Richard Branson
Founder of Virgin Group
Virgin Group founder and one of the few mega-founders on the warning side of the AI debate: he signed the October 2025 statement urging a prohibition on superintelligence development, after years of arguing AI’s wealth must fund a safety net for displaced workers.
In his words
If a lot more wealth is created by AI, the least that the country should be able to do is that a lot of that wealth that is created by AI goes back into making sure that everybody has a safety net.
We call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is (1) broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and (2) strong public buy-in.
Biography
Sir Richard Branson (born 1950) built the Virgin Group from a mail-order record shop into a global brand spanning airlines, trains, telecoms, and spaceflight — the archetypal swashbuckling founder, with a knighthood and a private island to show for it. That résumé makes his position in the AI debate conspicuous: he is one of very few billionaire company-builders publicly urging restraint.
The optimist who signed the warning
Branson’s concerns began with labor. From 2017 he argued that AI-driven job displacement makes universal basic income inevitable, telling interviewers that AI’s wealth must flow back into a safety net and predicting three-day workweeks. He framed the disruption as manageable — “it’s up to all of us to be entrepreneurially minded enough to create those new jobs” — and even backed AI ventures, including the self-driving startup Wayve.
In October 2025 he went further, joining Geoffrey Hinton, Steve Wozniak, Prince Harry, and more than 850 others in signing the Future of Life Institute’s Statement on Superintelligence, which demands a halt to superintelligence development until there is scientific consensus it can be done safely and strong public buy-in. The statement cited risks from economic obsolescence and loss of civil liberties up to human extinction.
Branson’s stance is warning rather than rejection: he uses and invests in AI, and his objection is to an uncontrolled race toward systems beyond human oversight, not to the technology’s everyday value. Skeptics note he offered no plan beyond the signature; admirers counter that a lifelong techno-optimist lending his name to the caution camp is exactly what makes the signal costly and credible.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/richard-branson