In early October, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said “the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits” of artificial intelligence technology.
In early October, a claim spread online that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the world needs to “accept some bad things happening” in exchange for the benefits of artificial intelligence technology.
For example, a post on the offical X account of Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction market, reads (archived), “JUST IN: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declares the world needs to ‘accept some bad things happening’ in exchange for the benefits of AI.”
In short, Altman did produce the above statement during an interview with Politico’s The Decoded Podcast. As such, we rate the quote as correctly attributed to Altman.
The OpenAI CEO was speaking with Politico’s Brendan Bordelon on Oct. 5. Altman was responding to a question about how he would enforce rules around AI compared to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodie, who is in favor of more regulations.
The transcript below begins at the 8:17 mark of the episode (emphasis ours):
BORDELON: Where do you specifically diverge from Anthropic and its pro-regulation CEO, Dario, when it comes to new AI rules? Where’s the daylight?
ALTMAN: I think there’s a lot of daylight. We have always been a big believer that this technology has to be democratized and put in people’s hands. I think one of the biggest differences between us and some of the stricter, let’s say, AI safety people is we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.
So like, you know, 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.” I think that is a completely unacceptable trade-off from a perspective of liberty and human agency and people self-determining the future. But I understand where it comes from, and I do think the lighter touch regulatory stance that we advocate for comes with an accepting of the fact that some bad things are going to happen as society figures out the resilience.
So, I wouldn’t take a trade of saying like, “We’ll make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no kind of, like, 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. But when it comes to the potential of, like, a serious loss of control to AI, and this is not a today worry, but it may not be in the distant future, this is where I would say to the accelerationists like, “Let’s be a little thoughtful about lurching into this future.”
So I would say, “Accept bounded risks, accept risks that we understand in exchange for the benefits and liberty, agency all those things I was just talking about, but don’t accept, like, the really catastrophic risk.”
The podcast episode is also available on YouTube.
In an article about the episode, Politico notes that Altman agreed with Amodei on the need to slow down AI development and that Altman’s lobbyists have been backing new AI safety requirements from the government.
For further reading, Snopes has covered numerous claims about AI data centers and a rumor about Altman.
