OpenAI CEO Says Benefits of AI Outweigh Risks, Argues for Open Access

OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said in a recent interview that the benefits of artificial intelligence justify accepting some level of risk, and argued that the technology should remain broadly open to the public rather than being tightly controlled by a few laboratories.

“We believe the world should accept certain negative events in exchange for the benefits of this technology and the agency people have,” Altman said. He also noted that OpenAI and rival Anthropic still hold fundamentally different worldviews on AI regulation, describing the gap as “enormous.”

Responding to the view that AI is too powerful and dangerous to be entrusted to a single lab, Altman called such an approach a “completely unacceptable trade-off” and inconsistent with OpenAI's preferred light-touch regulatory stance. He said he would not accept compromises aimed solely at preventing hacking, abuse, fraud and other negative outcomes, because the positive results people achieve with the technology would outweigh the downsides by orders of magnitude.

His remarks come amid intensifying debate within the AI industry over the pace of development and the risks posed by increasingly capable systems. While advocating openness and tolerance for some misuse, Altman drew a line, saying he would not accept a severe loss of future control or extreme concentration of power.