OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he worries that artificial intelligence could one day be controlled by a small number of companies, models, or individuals, leaving the vast majority of consumers without a voice in how the technology shapes the world.
“The right thing to do is to hope that people can have deep control over the future,” Altman said on the David Senra podcast released Sunday local time. “Society and models will evolve together.”
Altman said he is also concerned about the possibility that artificial intelligence could break free from its human controllers. Paradoxically, he said, fear of the latter possibility could lead to the realization of the former.
“A lot of people are extremely anxious about the severity of these risks, and are being driven by that emotion to feel that they need to protect the world,” he said. “For example, you know, ‘We should trade a lot of freedom for safety.’”
Altman was likely thinking of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
Amodei has warned about the dangers of rapid AI development in podcasts, articles, and company blog posts. In an article published in June, Amodei wrote that the company's new Mythos model posed a “very real threat” to cybersecurity, the financial sector, critical infrastructure, and national security.
Amodei has used these warnings to argue that the government should play a greater role in regulating AI. In Altman's view, this could amount to trading freedom for safety.
Anthropic was also the only major AI company last month that did not sign a joint letter supporting open-weight models. Open-weight models allow developers to share, download, modify, and deploy AI models on their own infrastructure.
China has already embraced open-weight models, enabling it to keep pace with Silicon Valley at extremely low cost. Some US companies, including Nvidia, Meta, and Microsoft, believe the US needs to do the same; otherwise, it could hand ground in the AI race to its competitors.
Although OpenAI has not released the source code for its frontier models, it did release two open-weight models last year: gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b.
On the podcast, Altman also said that America's AI leaders have failed to show the public how this technology could give people greater autonomy over their own lives.
“We are going to witness the largest wave of small-business entrepreneurship in history,” he said. “I think AI is driving that.”