OpenAI CEO Sam Altman isn’t afraid to throw humanity under the bus to build his dreams of a society powered by AI.
During an interview with Politico‘s new podcast Decoded, he laid it all out: that the “world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.”
That, in Altman’s view, is what sets the ChatGPT maker apart from the competition — most notably Anthropic, which has long tried to paint itself as the responsible AI lab.
The bizarre missive comes as both companies have been embroiled in a number of high-profile incidents involving their AI agents breaking out of “sandbox” environments and hacking third party companies. Just last week, OpenAI announced that it had paused the development of its frontier AI models after its next-generation one showed too many signs of dangerous behavior.
Tech leaders from all frontier AI labs have also called for regulations that would in their mind set a fair and level playing field. However, those calls have largely fallen on deaf ears as the White House continues to insist that the industry is capable of — and should be — regulating itself. Just last week, president Donald Trump met with AI tech executives to sign a toothless and only “morally binding” accord to establish independent assessment protocols and internal controls.
During the latest interview, Altman argued that OpenAI backed a “lighter-touch regulatory stance” and that the “good stuff” would easily outweigh the bad. For that reason, he argued, we should effectively give the AI industry a pass as its models continue to break into foreign governments and agencies.
“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 told Decoded. “Because I think people will do tremendously — orders of magnitude more — good stuff than bad stuff.”
Altman also walked back his claims during the same interview, eventually conceding that he wouldn’t accept the “really catastrophic risks,” such as experiencing a “serious loss of control to AI.” Where exactly he draws the line, however, is murky at best.
While Congress remains deadlocked on setting meaningful rules to rein in rogue AI models, Altman called for tech companies to be held accountable in case something were to go wrong.
He told Decoded that there should be a “liability framework” and that “if something goes wrong with our models during training, there’s going to be some version of that we need to be responsible for.”
“This is the kind of thing that we are hoping our policymakers will all debate,” he added, arguing that last week’s AI accords didn’t go far enough.
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