OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has called for public faith in AI developers to manage the technology responsibly, even as he acknowledged that mounting fears over rapid advancements are justified.
“The world should trust that we are going to do the right thing because it’s the right thing and we feel the magnitude of this,” Altman said Tuesday during a Salesforce conference in San Francisco.
He conceded that the accelerating capability of AI tools makes apprehension rational. “It doesn’t take as much imagination as it used to for [us] to imagine how this could go wrong,” he said. “I think the world is right to be afraid of this.”
Altman’s remarks marked his first public appearance since a viral post last week by a departing Anthropic researcher who warned that unchecked AI could lead to human extinction by the end of the decade. Several AI leaders, including Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk, endorsed the researcher’s dire assessment. Amodei subsequently called for a slowdown in development and urged government regulation.
By Tuesday, however, a contingent of industry executives was advocating for self-regulation over state intervention. Altman expressed confidence that companies like his own can police themselves effectively. “We will get it right, I’m very confident in our company’s and industry’s ability to do this safely,” he said, adding that the sector would keep “alignment and safety way ahead of capabilities” and would “slow down or stop” if necessary.
Political figures in Washington pushed back sharply against the self-regulation argument. Speaking at a separate conference, Senator Bernie Sanders warned that critical decisions on AI are currently being made by “a handful of the richest people in the world,” citing Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos. “The people of this country must make the decisions about AI, and not just a handful of oligarchs,” Sanders said.
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon echoed the skepticism at the same event. “We can never trust what an oligarch says because… they’re disingenuous and they lie,” Bannon stated, dismissing the tech industry’s capacity for self-governance.
