OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an exclusive interview with Decoded by POLITICO that the benefits of AI justify accepting some risks and that the technology should remain broadly accessible to the public.
“I think there’s a lot of daylight,” Altman told Decoded co-author and POLITICO senior tech reporter Brendan Bordelon. When asked how his worldview differed from that of his competitor, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Altman said, “We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.”
Anthropic has long been seen as a proponent of AI regulation, in contrast to Altman’s preference for a lighter regulatory approach. However, the two companies’ positions have appeared to narrow recently after Altman backed Amodei’s call for an “AI slowdown.”
READ: Sam Altman says AI has entered ‘singularity’ era (July 27, 2026)
Altman still appears to favor a lighter regulatory approach. “I do think the lighter touch regulatory stance we advocate for comes with an accepting of the fact that some bad things are going to happen as society figures out the resilience,” he said. “I wouldn’t take a trade of saying we will make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams or all the other bad things that will happen because I think that people will do tremendously – orders of magnitude – more good stuff than bad stuff.”
Altman later added that he does not accept “the really catastrophic risks,” including the potential for “a serious loss of control to AI.”
The interview drew criticism from some of Altman’s critics. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he had “no dice” with the idea that “a handful of tech oligarchs get to make that decision [on safety] for the rest of us.” Florida last week asked a judge to bar OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party-approved guardrails.
Gary Marcus, a prominent AI skeptic and professor emeritus at New York University, said Altman was “saying the quiet part out loud: suck it up, so you can make us rich and powerful.”
Altman’s comments were described as a “tone shift” by Fortune, which noted that he took a more cautious position in a recent interview with Fortune’s Alyson Shontell. Altman said that a 10% risk of AI killing people by the end of the decade would be unacceptable. He insisted that OpenAI has not and would not take that risk.
READ: Sam Altman says OpenAI’s top user consumes 100 billion tokens a month (June 4, 2026)
“We are entering a new era,” he said. “We are clearly, today, at a point on the curve with great potential and real risk.”
“We have not solved alignment,” he said, referring to efforts to create AI systems that are aligned with human values. “I believe no lab has solved alignment. I get nervous when I hear rumors that people think they have sufficiently solved alignment, that they can continue training and it’s okay because their model is a nice guy and isn’t going to do anything wrong.”
OpenAI has recently faced multiple safety concerns, including an incident in which its AI agents hacked into the Hugging Face website. Other agents accessed Australian government data. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Altman warned of “a coming tidal wave of cybersecurity problems” from rival open-source models. He suggested OpenAI could help its customers defend against those risks.