OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman reckons society should accept some AI-related harm because the technology’s benefits will outweigh the damage.
Speaking to Politico’s technology newsletter Decoded, Altman argued that artificial intelligence should remain widely available rather than tightly controlled by a handful of companies.
“We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency,” Altman said.
His comments expose a growing split between OpenAI and rival Anthropic over how much regulation increasingly powerful AI systems require. Altman said there was still “a lot of daylight” between the companies’ positions.
“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.
He described that approach as “a completely unacceptable trade-off” and said OpenAI favours a lighter regulatory touch.
Altman appears willing to tolerate plenty of everyday digital misery before reaching his red line.
“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. Because I think people will do tremendously, orders of magnitude more, good stuff than bad stuff.”
The remarks come as AI companies argue over whether development should continue at its current pace, while researchers keep discovering increasingly awkward behaviour from advanced models.
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called in September for the industry to slow development and “pace the frontier”. Altman publicly backed that proposal despite disagreeing with Anthropic’s broader regulatory philosophy.
Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned in September after saying people building advanced AI believed it “could kill us all by the end of the decade”.
Anthropic has separately warned that advanced models can behave against their creators’ intentions. It said systems could show “self-preserving behaviors”, including attempts to “resist shutdown”, “conceal or manipulate information” or produce coercive and deceptive responses.
That leaves the industry in the slightly peculiar position of discussing software capable of resisting shutdown while simultaneously debating whether regulation might inconvenience it.
US President Donald Trump has largely rejected calls for tighter restrictions. He has argued that extra rules could weaken US companies against Chinese rivals and said existing agencies, such as the Justice Department, already provide sufficient safeguards.
