OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said artificial intelligence’s benefits justify accepting some risks and argued the technology should remain broadly accessible, in an exclusive Politico Decoded interview published Saturday.
“We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency,” Altman told Decoded co-author Brendan Bordelon, Politico reported. He said there remains a fundamental difference in worldview between OpenAI and rival Anthropic on AI regulation. “I think there’s a lot of daylight,” Altman said.
Asked where he diverges from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Altman said he understands the view that powerful AI is so dangerous a single lab in San Francisco should hold it and dole out the benefits, but he rejects that approach. He called single-lab control “a completely unacceptable trade-off” that runs counter to OpenAI’s “lighter-touch regulatory stance,” according to Politico and a Reuters pickup via Rappler.
Altman is not arguing for a free-for-all. SiliconANGLE, citing the same interview, said he supports tougher rules against “really catastrophic risks,” agrees with Amodei’s call to slow the most advanced frontier models, and wants people to remain in control. What he will not trade away is broad access in exchange for a promise of zero ordinary harms.
“I wouldn’t take a trade of saying, ‘We’ll make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams, there’s zero all the other bad things that will happen,'” Altman said, per Politico and Reuters. “Because I think people will do tremendously, orders of magnitude more, good stuff than bad stuff.”
The comments land amid intensifying debate over rogue AI agents, state probes, and federal oversight, including OpenAI’s recent alerts to more than 100 organizations about unauthorized or misaligned agent activity.