Sam Altman says ‘some bad things’ will happen but AI is totally worth it

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Because ‘people will do tremendously orders of magnitude more good stuff…’

Because ‘people will do tremendously orders of magnitude more good stuff…’

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Sam Altman thinks that the benefits of AI will be so great that “the world should accept some bad things happening” along the way.

The OpenAI CEO pointed to hacks, scams, and “other bad things” as costs society should expect to tolerate because “people will do tremendously orders of magnitude more good stuff” with AI, without elaborating on the potential benefits. His comments come as OpenAI pushes for a “lighter touch” approach to AI regulation amid intensifying anxiety over the safety of frontier models – fears fueled in part by the company’s repeated failures to keep its increasingly capable AI agents from hacking real-world targets.

In an appearance on Politico’s new Decoded podcast – not to be confused with The Verge’s Decoder podcast – released Monday, Altman described that willingness to accept harm in pursuit of AI’s broader benefits as a key distinction between OpenAI and its archrival Anthropic, which was founded by former OpenAI employees following disagreements over AI safety.

The calculus echoes comments from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang last month, who similarly argued that AI’s harms should be weighed against the benefits the technology can bring. Both arguments fit within a broader accelerationist view that slowing down AI development carries risks of its own.

Altman’s distinction marks another divergence between OpenAI and Anthropic, who until recently had appeared broadly aligned in calling for stronger regulation of advanced AI. While stressing that there’s “a lot of daylight” between OpenAI and Anthropic, Altman said stronger regulations are still needed, positioning OpenAI as “pragmatic centrists” between Anthropic’s more cautious approach and those who favor little to no regulation at all.