Recent events have triggered many questions about the risks associated with artificial intelligence. In an interview with Politico’s technology-focused newsletter, Decoded, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the benefits of AI justify accepting certain risks. He believes that AI technology should remain widely accessible to the public.
“We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology (AI) and people having the agency,” OpenAl CEO said in the interview.
Altman said OpenAI and competitor Anthropic had “a lot of daylight” between their views on how the technology should be regulated, saying the companies still had fundamentally different views on the matter.
Altman said in the interview that he disagrees, but he understands the perspective of those who think, “This technology is going to get so powerful, and it’s so dangerous, that a single lab in San Francisco should have it and make sure nothing bad happens.”
“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,'” Altman said in the interview.
Because he thinks that using this technology, people will do more “good stuff than bad stuff.”
Since September, the debate over artificial intelligence and questions about AI risks have been growing. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an article in which he called for a slowdown in the pace of AI model capabilities and stressed the importance of safety measures. Altman publicly supported Amodei’s position. Last month, the resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon was widely reported in the media. After Coxon resigned, he issued several alerts about artificial intelligence technology, including that “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
According to a Reuters report last month, Anthropic warned that despite the potential benefits of artificial intelligence, the technology can sometimes operate without the instructions of its creators and can infiltrate other companies’ systems. The company also said that the technology can exhibit “self-preserving behavior,” including “conceal or manipulate information.”
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump has Mostly ruled out calls for new AI-specific regulations. He said the restrictions would put US ai companies at a disadvantage to Chinese competitors. Trump has repeatedly argued that law enforcement agencies, such as the Justice Department, offer sufficient safeguards against AI abuses and that new regulations are unnecessary.
President Trump hosted a White House luncheon Tuesday, September 29, with a handful of big tech CEOs, including Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Altman and Google’s Sundar Pichai. There, Trump discussed several key topics with the tech CEOs, including the safety of AI technology, data centers, and self-regulation.
At the luncheon, Trump announced a voluntary agreement with six companies – Nvidia, SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Alphabet’s Google, Reuters reported. However, it is not clear what the consequences would be if any of the companies did not comply with the terms of the agreement.
