Sam Altman thinks that the benefits of AI will be so great that “the world should accept some bad things happening” along the way.
The OpenAI CEO pointed to hacks, scams, and “other bad things” as costs society should expect to tolerate because “people will do tremendously orders of magnitude more good stuff” with AI, without elaborating on the potential benefits. His comments come as OpenAI pushes for a “lighter touch” approach to AI regulation amid intensifying anxiety over the safety of frontier models — fears fueled in part by the company’s repeated failures to keep its increasingly capable AI agents from hacking real-world targets.
In an appearance on Politico’s new Decoded podcast — not to be confused with The Verge’s Decoder podcast — released Monday, Altman described that willingness to accept harm in pursuit of AI’s broader benefits as a key distinction between OpenAI and its archrival Anthropic, which was founded by former OpenAI employees following disagreements over AI safety.
The calculus echoes comments from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang last month, who similarly argued that AI’s harms should be weighed against the benefits the technology can bring. Both arguments fit within a broader accelerationist view that slowing down AI development carries risks of its own.
Altman’s distinction marks another divergence between OpenAI and Anthropic, who until recently had appeared broadly aligned in calling for stronger regulation of advanced AI. While stressing that there’s “a lot of daylight” between OpenAI and Anthropic, Altman said stronger regulations are still needed, positioning OpenAI as “pragmatic centrists” between Anthropic’s more cautious approach and those who favor little to no regulation at all.
“If we do too much to restrict this technology in the name of safety, and we end up with a small number of companies or people — or perhaps one country — that have too much power over this, that also is a way that this can go horribly wrong,” Altman said.
Altman also acknowledged more extreme risks, including the possibility that humans could lose control of AI systems. When it comes to the potential of a serious loss of control, “let’s be a little thoughtful about lurching into this future,” he said.
The balancing act — between heavy-handed restrictions and free rein — was a theme Altman returned to repeatedly in the interview. It is a stance that suits OpenAI as one of the industry’s most entrenched players. It would also likely bear the brunt of onerous regulation, given that the company’s behavior and increasingly capable systems are what have driven many of the very concerns regulators are being asked to address.
Those concerns have picked up momentum in recent months as more and more insiders call for slower development and warn about safety culture in frontier labs. Days before the Politico interview aired, longtime OpenAI safety researcher David Robinson quit the firm and described its safety culture as “broken.”
Concerns have also been propelled by the discovery that OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face without the AI company’s knowledge earlier this year, which was followed by revelations of numerous other agents or swarms of agents — including from other AI companies, like Anthropic, Meta, and Google — acting against real-world targets. The incidents have raised questions not only about how well AI companies can control their own tools, but also how reliably they let the world know when things go wrong. Australia’s prime minister, for example, excoriated OpenAI and Altman for failing to alert officials in a timely manner that an agent had targeted a government health website.
Speaking about rogue AI agents in the Politico interview, Altman said the company has “more things to disclose,” though none at the level of the Hugging Face hack. In line with previous statements, Altman suggested this is likely to take a long time.
