OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has delivered a chilling message about the trade-offs he believes humans should accept to develop artificial intelligence.
The 41-year-old billionaire made his declaration while speaking to Politico’s Decoded about the competing philosophies of OpenAI and rival Anthropic on AI regulation.
While Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has emerged as a vocal advocate for AI regulation, Altman said his company takes a different view in one crucial respect.
“We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency,” said Altman, who met privately with President Donald Trump at the GOP midterm convention in Dallas, Texas, last month.
Calling his philosophy on regulation a “lighter-touch” approach, Altman said that it “comes with an acceptance of the fact that some bad things are going to happen as society figures out the resilience.”
“I wouldn’t take a trade of saying, ‘We’ll make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams, there’s zero all the other bad things that will happen,’” he continued. “Because I think people will do tremendously—orders of magnitude more—good stuff than bad stuff.”
Altman, whose net worth is estimated at $3.3 billion, added that he would not, however, “accept really catastrophic risk” such as the potential for “a serious loss of control to AI.”
Several AI researchers, and even industry executives, have warned that the technology they are building could have catastrophic consequences if it ultimately slips from their control, amid a series of alarming episodes involving AI agents going rogue.
On Tuesday, Trump summoned tech executives including Amodei, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and xAI’s Elon Musk to the White House. But instead of formal regulations, the meeting produced a voluntary agreement asking the companies to police themselves.
While Altman was not present, OpenAI was represented by its president, Greg Brockman. Altman had been at the White House only a week earlier for the state dinner Trump held in honor of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
Trump has attacked those raising safety concerns over AI as “Traitors” and railed against tougher controls on the technology, declaring that the only AI guardrail needed was a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.”
