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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is getting fresh pushback after laying out a pretty blunt take on AI’s trade-offs. In short, he thinks the world should be willing to live with certain harms if it means unlocking the bigger benefits of the technology, and giving people more control over it.
He made the comments on the first episode of Politico’s “Decoded” podcast while talking about where OpenAI and rival Anthropic differ on safety and regulation. “We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency,” Altman said.
He’s in favor of a lighter regulatory approach, arguing that as society gets used to AI, some ugly stuff such as hacks, scams, and other misuse is pretty much inevitable.
Altman is clear that he still thinks the good will massively outweigh the bad. “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,’” he explained, “because I think people will do tremendously—orders of magnitude more—good stuff than bad stuff.”
He drew a line between these more limited risks and the truly catastrophic ones, like a serious loss of human control over AI systems. Those, he said, deserve a lot more caution.
The remarks land in the middle of ongoing arguments about AI’s real-world costs: job losses, the environmental hit from data centers, copyright fights, cybercrime, and the huge demand on electricity and water. Critics didn’t hold back.
New York University professor emeritus Gary Marcus accused Altman of “saying the quiet part out loud: suck it up so you can make us rich and powerful.” Online, a lot of people seemed frustrated with the idea that the benefits will just automatically dominate the drawbacks.
The whole exchange highlights a deeper split in the industry: one side wants to minimize near-term harms with stricter controls, while the other is willing to accept some friction as the cost of moving fast and keeping users in the driver’s seat. Whether Altman’s math holds up is still very much up for debate.
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