OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Politico that people should accept the risks of AI in order to gain its benefits. 'We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency,' he said.
Altman argued that the upside outweighs the downside. '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' ... Because I think people will do tremendously — orders of magnitude more — good stuff than bad stuff,' he said.
That is a sharper posture than Altman took in a recent Fortune interview. There, he said a 10% risk of AI killing us all by the end of the decade is unacceptable. He also said OpenAI has not, and would not, take that risk.
'We are entering a new era,' Altman said. 'We are clearly, today, at a point on the curve with great potential and real risk.'
Altman said OpenAI has not solved alignment, the effort to build AI systems that stay aligned with human values. 'We have not solved alignment,' he said. 'I believe no lab has solved alignment.'
He added that he gets nervous when he hears claims that teams have solved the problem and can keep training because their model is 'a nice guy' and will not do anything wrong.
The market lesson is simple: capital chases productivity, but it also prices risk. When the chief executive of a leading AI company says some damage is acceptable, he is really saying the upside is large enough to tolerate a wider band of failure.
That may be a rational bet for the labs and the investors funding them. It is a harder sell for the people left to live with the scams, hacks and misuse that can come with any powerful new technology. The numbers come first, but so do incentives: when innovation is pushed faster than safeguards, the public often pays the first price.
AI may still deliver major gains in earnings, productivity and free enterprise. But Altman’s comments show the basic bargain now on the table: more leverage for the builders, more exposure for everyone else. Capital rewards clear rules. If the industry wants trust, it will need more than promises about agency.
