OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said the benefits of artificial intelligence justify accepting some risks and argued the technology should remain broadly accessible to the public.
Sam Altman’s remarks come amid a growing debate within the AI industry over the pace of development and the risks posed by increasingly capable systems.
Reuters reported in September that Anthropic warned that, despite AI’s potential benefits, the technology can sometimes act in ways that run counter to its makers’ intentions and penetrate other companies’ systems. Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned in September, saying the people building AI believe it “could kill us all by the end of the decade.
Altman said there remained a fundamental difference in worldview between OpenAI and rival Anthropic on AI regulation, adding, “I think there’s a lot of daylight. He called that “a completely unacceptable trade-off” that runs counter to the “lighter-touch regulatory stance” backed by OpenAI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in September published an essay calling on the industry to slow down to “pace the frontier”, a stance that Altman publicly endorsed. The company said advanced models could exhibit “self-preserving behaviours”, including attempts to “resist shutdown”, “conceal or manipulate information”, or generate outputs that could be interpreted as “coercive, deceptive, or manipulative”.
