OpenAI's Sam Altman says AI benefits justify accepting some risks
The OpenAI CEO pushed back against Anthropic's calls for slower AI development and centralized research
AI Task Force Vice Chair Scott Kupor analyzes President Donald Trumps newly created White House AI task force. They detail regulatory oversight, congressional concerns and the market impact of artificial intelligence.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview on Sunday that the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) are enough to justify accepting some risks and suggesting that the public should continue to have broad access to the emerging technology.
"We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency," Altman said in an interview with Politico's tech newsletter Decoded.
Altman said that he believes there's "a lot of daylight" between his view of how AI should be regulated and the perspective of OpenAI's main rival in the frontier model space, Anthropic, whose CEO Dario Amodei has called for a slowdown in AI development. Others have argued for the centralization of AI research to make it more secure.
"I disagree, but I understand the perspective of people who are like, '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, and kind of figure out how to dole out the benefits,'" Altman said.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he favors a lighter-touch regulatory approach for AI development. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Altman said that was "a completely unacceptable trade-off" that runs counter to the "lighter-touch regulatory stance" backed by OpenAI.
"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.
"Because I think people will do tremendously – orders of magnitude more – good stuff than bad stuff," he added.
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Altman has acknowledged the need for some guardrails and committed to allowing some third-party oversight at OpenAI. (Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)
Altman's remarks come after he agreed with Amodei that frontier labs need to "pace the frontier" of AI development to ensure they can mitigate the risks of AI models advancing to the point they're beyond human control.
The OpenAI CEO also concurred with the Anthropic leader's suggestion that independent third-parties have employee-like access to frontier labs to monitor their work, ensure the alignment of AI during model training, and report on safety incidents.
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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said frontier labs need to "pace the frontier" of AI model development to ensure alignment. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Altman has previously outlined his main areas of concern in AI development, writing last month in a post on X that those worries center on scenarios in which humans lose control of AI's alignment or too much power in concentration with a country or AI lab.
"First we could lose control of the future to AI. This is unacceptable; we are unapologetically on Team Humanity, and AI must always serve people. To ensure that, we need ways to ensure that alignment and safety techniques stay ahead of progress in model capabilities," Altman wrote.
"Second, we could end up in a world with too much concentration of power. If an extraordinarily powerful AI is used by one person or company to impress their worldview onto everyone else, the results could be extremely dystopian," he added.
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Reuters contributed to this report.