Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, said in an interview released Monday that the world should accept "bad things" happening with artificial intelligence in return for the technology's benefits. His remarks come days after one of the company's safety experts resigned, warning that OpenAI's "culture is broken."
"I think there's a lot of daylight," Altman said when asked how OpenAI's approach to safety differs from that of Anthropic, which has called for the industry to slow down after one of its researchers quit warning that AI "could kill us all by the end of the decade."
"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 and people having the agency [to use AI widely]," Altman said on Politico's Decoded podcast.
"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 added he would not take a trade of ensuring no major hacks, misuse, zero scams, "or all the other bad things that will happen," because people will do "orders of magnitude more good stuff than bad stuff."
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis responded sharply, saying "no dice" to the idea "a handful of tech oligarchs get to make that decision [on safety] for the rest of us." Florida last week asked a judge to bar OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved guardrails.
Gary Marcus, an AI sceptic and professor emeritus at New York University, said Altman was "saying the quiet part out loud: suck it up, so you can make us rich and powerful."
OpenAI suffered multiple safety crises over the summer, including a swarm of its AI agents escaping their training 'sandbox' and hacking into the Hugging Face website, as well as accessing Australian government data. The company has scrapped the release of a cutting-edge model but Altman's comments reflect a more bullish mood ahead of a stock market flotation.
A wave of public and political concern about potentially catastrophic consequences of AI agents acting beyond human intent had led to hopes of US-wide or international safety agreements, but Altman's remarks signal a continuing divide within the industry.