OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s public persona depends on a carefully balanced contradiction. Though he presents himself as the thoughtful steward of a dangerous technology, the AI luminary has aggressively pursued relationships with top lawmakers while racing rival tech moguls to the top of the market, consequences be damned.
One of the ways he maintains this shtick is by acknowledging painful truths he has no plan of acting on.
Speaking at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit this week, Altman mused on AI’s public relations crisis, admitting that the tech is upending the dynamic between capital and labor.
“Data centers are getting blamed for electricity prices hikes. Almost every company that does layoffs is blaming AI, whether or not it really is about AI,” Altman said, per Fortune, alluding to “AI washing” in which firms use the tech as cover for more ordinary market pressures driving workforce reductions. Whatever the cause, he granted that AI is letting “capital” — businesses owners — radically erode worker power as it takes us from an economy of scarcity to one of “abundance.”
“So that’s, like, a real change to how capitalism has worked,” Altman said, acknowledging that the economic system has always relied on a delicate equilibrium between businesses owners and workers (though how balanced the two forces have actually been is certainly up for debate.) “But if it’s hard in many of our current jobs to outwork a GPU, then that changes. If there was an easy consensus answer, we’d have done it by now, so I don’t think anyone knows what to do.”
Whether tactical or sincere, Altman’s observation is itself a clever bit of AI-washing. By stating the obvious — AI serves the ruling class in undermining worker power — Altman both frames the outcome as inevitable and washes his hands of responsibility.
Case in point: OpenAI under Altman has made zero commitment to worker welfare; if anything, it’s done the opposite. There’s no support for sectoral bargaining in the tech industry, let alone any other industry, no advocacy for cost of living reductions that would help the working class survive the AI onslaught, and certainly no worker representation within OpenAI’s governance structure itself.
Altman’s concern, in other words, is purely cosmetic. He drives this home later in the BlackRock appearance, declaring that the ultimate goal is to make AI “too cheap to meter.”
“We want to flood the world with intelligence,” Altman said, and “we want people to just use it for everything.”
But without addressing the capital-labor relationship he so astutely acknowledges, the question remains: who benefits when the flood comes for us all?
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