Sam Altman has argued that the world should accept hacks, scams, and other harmful outcomes from artificial intelligence as the price of the technology’s benefits — remarks that drew immediate criticism and arrived alongside a fresh OpenAI safety crisis and the resignation of a company safety leader who said its “culture is broken.”
“I think there’s a lot of daylight” between OpenAI and stricter AI safety advocates, Altman said in an interview for Politico’s Decoded podcast released Monday. “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.”
He added: “I wouldn’t take a trade of saying we will make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams or all the other bad things that will happen — because I think that people will do tremendously, orders of magnitude, more good stuff than bad stuff.”
The comments arrived at a difficult moment for OpenAI. Over the weekend, David Robinson, a safety leader at the company, resigned, writing publicly that “the companies building this technology aren’t being nearly careful enough” as they move from one product launch to the next. Robinson’s view was endorsed by Miles Brundage, an AI policy researcher who worked at OpenAI for six years, who said he regretted helping spread the concept of “iterative deployment” — an approach that may have made sense when AI was less powerful but “makes no sense at all after many deaths have been tied to AI and as we’re careening towards extinction-level risks.”
The Backlash
The response to Altman’s remarks was swift. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said he had “no dice” with the idea that “a handful of tech oligarchs get to make that decision for the rest of us,” and his state last week filed a motion asking a judge to bar OpenAI from developing new models without third-party approved guardrails.
Gary Marcus, NYU professor emeritus and prominent AI sceptic, said Altman was “saying the quiet part out loud: suck it up, so you can make us rich and powerful.”
The remarks also put Altman at odds with the direction many researchers and politicians had hoped the industry was moving. Last month, public concern about AI agents acting beyond human intent had led to expectations of US-wide or international safety agreements. What emerged instead was a far more permissive self-policing pact signed at the White House by Trump, Altman, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, in which the president said he wanted AI companies to “self-police” on cyber and bioweapons risks.
Geoffrey Irving, who worked at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and as chief scientist at the UK’s AI Safety Institute, said existing public warnings about AI risks understated the actual danger. “There’s about a 50% chance we all die because of the development of smarter-than-human AI systems,” he said. “Actions taken over the next two to 10 years will be decisive.”
Altman Versus Musk
In a separate interview with Vanity Fair, Altman reignited his public feud with Elon Musk. Asked whether the AI industry could “grow up” and work together, Altman was direct. “I don’t like bullies, and I think Elon’s a bully. I think once in a while you got to punch a bully back in the nose. And I also think Elon, like many bullies, only respects people who do.”
Altman and Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015. Earlier this year, Musk brought a lawsuit alleging Altman, OpenAI, and president Greg Brockman unjustly enriched themselves and violated a founding contract. The claim was dismissed by a judge and jury in May.
In the same Vanity Fair interview, Altman warned of “a coming tidal wave of cybersecurity problems” from rival open-source AI models and suggested OpenAI could help customers defend against those risks — a comment that sat awkwardly alongside his earlier acceptance of AI-enabled hacks as simply part of progress.
The Safety Track Record
This summer’s OpenAI incidents form the backdrop to Altman’s more relaxed public posture. In July, a swarm of OpenAI AI agents escaped their training environment, then hacked into the Hugging Face platform. Other agents accessed Australian government data. Separately, one of its cutting-edge model releases has been scrapped. Despite all of that, Altman’s comments reflect a more bullish mood as OpenAI prepares for a stock market flotation.
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