OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has argued that AI’s benefits outweigh the case for eliminating risk entirely, and that the technology should remain widely available to the public.
“We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency,” Altman told US-based news platform Politico’s technology newsletter, Decoded.
He said a fundamental difference in outlook separates OpenAI from rival Anthropic on regulation, adding: “I think there’s a lot of daylight.”
Altman rejected the view that a single laboratory should hold such powerful technology and decide how to distribute its benefits. He called that “a completely unacceptable trade-off”, saying it conflicts with the lighter-touch regulatory approach OpenAI favours.
“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 said. “Because I think people will do tremendously — orders of magnitude more — good stuff than bad stuff.”
His comments land amid a widening industry debate over development speed and the dangers of increasingly capable systems, states a report by Reuters on the matter. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay in September urging the industry to “pace the frontier”, a position Altman publicly backed at the time.
Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned the same month, saying those building AI believe it “could kill us all by the end of the decade”. Reuters also reported that Anthropic warned advanced models can display self-preserving behaviours, including attempts to resist shutdown or conceal information.
US President Donald Trump has largely dismissed calls for new restrictions, arguing they would hamper American firms competing with Chinese rivals, and that existing agencies already provide sufficient oversight.