OpenAI’s Sam Altman said Saturday that he’s “very uncomfortable” with people treating AI like a god.
In a vaguepost on X, Altman said that people who try to “ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models” are a safety issue.
I am very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models, and think it is a real safety issue.
— Sam Altman (@sama) October 3, 2026
Altman did not explain what prompted his declaration on X. It comes just days after a discourse-stirring article in The New York Times about rival Anthropic’s meeting with religious leaders.
It also comes as one of OpenAI‘s safety leaders, David Robinson, quit and publicly rebuked his former employer’s own safety record and efforts.
If Altman’s comments were a jibe at Anthropic, it would be the latest in a long-running beef between the two companies. Anthropic was started by OpenAI defectors and has portrayed itself as more safety-minded.
Earlier this week, the Times reported that an Anthropic cofounder, Chris Olah, had held a number of secret meetings with religious leaders to discuss the company’s AI models.
The focus of those talks, attendees told the newspaper, was whether Claude might have achieved consciousness and how Anthropic could inculcate morality into increasingly powerful and autonomous AI models.
“How do you help them be stable? How do you help them to mature? How do you help them be, you know, deeply moral?” he told the Times.
An Anthropic spokesperson has not responded to a request for comment from Business Insider, but told The Times that the main moral question at the meetings was not about Claude’s “suffering,” and the topic likely arose “organically.”
Tech companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon have also approached top religious figures about AI. In April, representatives from those companies met in Rome to discuss protecting children in the AI era. They briefly encountered Pope Leo XIV, who has cautioned against an overeliance on machines and advocated for the humanity since becoming head of the Catholic Church last year.
“If we are to avoid losing our humanity amid a ‘paradise of machines’ invading and conditioning our daily lives, there is an urgent need for education in ethical discernment and the capacity to acknowledge the moral good,” he said in an address to diplomats in September,
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