OpenAI Group PBC Chief Executive Sam Altman is worried that artificial intelligence technology will end up being controlled by just a handful of companies or people in the future, resulting in nobody else having any say about how it impacts society.
Speaking in an interview with podcaster David Senra, Altman warned against a situation in which most people lose their voice as AI changes the world. “The right approach is for people to deeply control the future,” he said. “Society and the model will evolve together.”
Altman also said he’s worried that AI could one day escape human control, but believes that, paradoxically, the fear of this happening could well enable the first situation to arise. “There are a lot of people who are so nervous about the magnitude of those risks and get so taken by that and feel a need to protect the world,” Altman said.
His comments were almost certainly a thinly veiled reference to his rival, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has been one of the most vocal alarmists about the potential risks of AI and has consistently stressed the need for safeguards around the technology.
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Amodei has become one of the industry’s biggest advocates of greater government regulation. But Altman said he disagrees, because if the industry heads in that direction, it’s effectively going to be giving up its liberty for safety reasons.
Anthropic refused to endorse open-weight models, which can be shared, downloaded, modified and run on independent infrastructure. They’re essentially the open-source version of AI.
OpenAI’s most powerful frontier models are still entirely closed source, but the company did release a couple of open-weight models last year, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b. So far, Anthropic has not released a single open-weight model.
Altman also told Senra that the AI industry has failed to show people how the technology can give people more autonomy and more opportunities. “We are about to see the greatest boom in people starting smaller businesses than we have ever seen,” he insisted. “AI is empowering that.”
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However, Altman conceded that this boom will be slower to arrive than he once believed. He admitted that his initial estimate on AI’s timeline was wrong, and said society and the economy are going to take more time to adapt to it than he first thought.
For one thing, he said he thought software businesses would become vulnerable to AI much sooner, but now realizes that there’s too much inertia in the economy for that to happen overnight. The CEO said he got it wrong because he assumed that organizations would reinvent the way they work around frontier models almost as quickly as they could be improved.
Altman said he believes the lag between development and implementation will make the world’s transition “smoother and slower,” acting as a stabilizing force that prevents too much economic and societal disruption.