Sam Altman is free to pursue his goal of using artificial intelligence to cure cancer after signing off on another apparent priority: allowing OpenAI to create pornography.
On Tuesday afternoon, Altman posted to his X account that he has signed off on easing the restrictions on OpenAI, allowing ChatGPT to “treat adult users like adults.”
As part of this initiative, Altman promised that in December, “We will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.”
We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right.Now that we have…
— Sam Altman (@sama) October 14, 2025
This is a stark contrast to the ambitions for AI that Altman wrote about in a Sept. 24 blog post titled “Abundant Intelligence.” There, Altman laid out his vision for how artificial intelligence could benefit all of mankind, which included AI curing cancer.
“If AI stays on the trajectory that we think it will, then amazing things will be possible,” he wrote.
“Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer. Or with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to provide customized tutoring to every student on earth. If we are limited by compute, we’ll have to choose which one to prioritize; no one wants to make that choice, so let’s go build.”
ChatGPT placed some severe restrictions on the type of content allowed on the platform after a teenage boy took his own life with the alleged direction of ChatGPT.
The restrictions limited explicit content on the platform, which led to erotica writers using ChatGPT to “write” sex scenes to complain.
According to Altman, the issues with ChatGPT that caused it to help users ideate suicide have been solved, and as a bonus, adults can use ChatGPT to create porn again.
“Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases,” he wrote.
Since Altman suggested AI could “cure cancer,” his critics have teased every OpenAI initiative that is not connected to curing cancer. For example, in late September, when OpenAI launched Sora 2—the hyper-realistic video maker that inspired users to send AI-generated videos of the late Robin Williams to his daughter Zelda—Altman responded to criticism that the videos had nothing to do with his supposed scientific desires.
“We do mostly need the capital for build AI that can do science, and for sure we are focused on AGI [Artifical General Intelligence] with almost all of our research effort. It is also nice to show people cool new tech/products along the way, make them smile, and hopefully make some money given all that compute need,” he wrote.
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