OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said people should have greater trust in AI companies to develop the technology responsibly, even as concerns grow over the potential risks posed by increasingly powerful AI systems.
“The world should trust that we are going to do the right thing because it’s the right thing and we feel the magnitude of this,” Altman said on Tuesday during a conference in San Francisco.
However, Altman acknowledged that the public was justified in being concerned about AI, saying the technology had advanced rapidly and made it easier to imagine potentially serious consequences.
“It doesn’t take as much imagination as it used to for [us] to imagine how this could go wrong,” he said. “I think the world is right to be afraid of this.”
Altman made the comments during an appearance at an annual conference hosted by software company Salesforce. It was his first public appearance since a post by a former Anthropic researcher went viral last week, warning that AI could potentially kill all humans by the end of the decade if left unchecked.
Several AI executives and experts said they agreed with the concerns, although they did not explain how they reached those conclusions or how such an outcome could occur.
The debate has fuelled renewed scrutiny of the AI industry, with Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei calling for the pace of AI development to slow and urging governments to regulate the sector.
Altman, along with Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis and X owner Elon Musk, publicly applauded Amodei’s call.
However, a number of industry leaders have since voiced support for AI companies taking greater responsibility for regulating themselves rather than relying on government intervention.
Altman said he believed AI companies such as OpenAI were capable of regulating themselves and keeping safety ahead of the development of more powerful systems.
“We will get it right, I’m very confident in our company’s and industry’s ability to do this safely,” he said, adding that AI firms should “keep alignment and safety way ahead of capabilities” and slow down or stop if they could not.
Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg also said AI labs had both the ability and incentive to take their own steps to make their models safer.
“Any lab that doesn’t focus on alignment will fall behind,” Zuckerberg wrote on X, arguing that companies also faced significant liability if their AI systems caused harm.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, speaking at the same conference, similarly said AI companies should retain control over decisions about whether new versions of their technology should be released.
“We don’t need new laws or regulations,” Huang said, adding that there should not be a “false choice” between AI innovation and safety.
“Safety is paramount. However, safety is an engineering problem,” he said, while arguing that AI companies should pause development or releases if their leaders felt they were no longer in control of the technology.
The push for industry self-regulation has drawn criticism from some AI figures. Jack Clark, an Anthropic executive and co-founder, described leaving AI as a completely unregulated industry as “rolling dice with immense risks”.
Patrick Hillman, chief operating officer of Logical Intelligence, also questioned whether technology companies could be trusted to act entirely in the public interest.
“If you believe what you are building is dangerous, show us what you are prepared to stop doing,” Hillman said.
Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic have begun discussions with other AI companies on developing industry-wide safety standards and checks.
Amodei said Anthropic was now in discussions with other companies about stronger safety standards, while OpenAI executive Chris Lehane said the company was working with AI labs including Anthropic and Google DeepMind on voluntary frontier AI standards.
