Sam Altman’s newest warning about the ‘bad things’ that come with AI is deeply unsettling
For the past month, slowing the development of artificial intelligence has been at the forefront of AI discourse. After a former OpenAI and Anthropic employee left the industry in September citing that “neither company is acting responsibly,” AI leaders and everyday citizens alike sounded off on the potential of an AI-powered doomsday.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei responded with an essay about the importance of “pacing the frontier,” or slowing AI development to prioritize safety. At the time, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agreed with Amodei, writing in a social media post that AI development “should be slower than it otherwise could be.”
But in a new interview, Altman seems to have changed his tune, saying OpenAI’s looser stance on AI safety is what sets the company apart from Anthropic—and some “bad things” that could happen as a result are a necessary evil.
On Politico’s podcast Decoded, host Brendan Bordelon asked Altman where OpenAI diverged from Anthropic and its “pro-regulation CEO” on AI policy.
“One of the differences between us and some of the stricter AI safety people is that we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology,” Altman replied.
“I do think the lighter-touch regulatory stance we advocate for comes with an accepting of the fact that some bad things are going to happen as society figures out the resilience,” he continued. “I wouldn’t take a trade of saying we will make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams or all the other bad things that will happen, because I think that people will do tremendously—orders of magnitude—more good stuff than bad stuff.”
‘Why are people not revolting?’: Social media sounds off
Altman’s comments immediately went viral, with post after post criticizing Altman for apparently valuing AI advancement over human safety.
“Why does this person have any authority over us? Why are people not revolting?” reads one response to Altman’s comments. It’s garnered more than 445,000 views on X.
“Why are we just letting these tech bros make these decisions for us? When did we all decide we don’t have any agency?” questioned another poster. “It’s easy to say the world needs to ‘accept some bad things happening’ when you aren’t the one the bad things are going to happen to!”
“Imagine Boeing’s CEO saying the world should accept a few plane crashes to get faster innovation in aviation,” a third poster wrote. “He’d be gone by lunch.”
Some politicians weighed in too, from both sides of the aisle. On the Republican front, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis questioned Altman’s authority on AI policy: “And a handful of tech oligarchs get to make that decision for the rest of us? No dice,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, Democrats including Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker criticized Altman’s stance as well. “Sam Altman shouldn’t be making any decisions about what ‘bad things’ we have to accept on all of our behalf,” Pritzker wrote. “I am not comfortable with that. None of us should be, especially when it comes to AI.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) also chimed in, calling Altman’s statement “absurd.”
“We should reject AI bots doing ‘bad things’ so that some of the richest corporations in the world can get even richer,” she wrote. “It’s time to enforce the laws already on the books, regulate AI, and protect people from serious harm.”