OpenAI’s Sam Altman Warns Humans Could Lose Control of AI

In brief

• Altman said AI progress should slow to accommodate safety checks and monitoring.
• OpenAI now prepares safety cases ahead of certain training runs, he said.
• He welcomed federal rules but urged companies to begin the work themselves.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI companies should accept slower development to make their systems safer and begin strengthening safeguards without waiting for legislation.

In a post on X on Sunday, the head of the company behind ChatGPT said AI’s rapid development risks putting the future beyond human control or concentrating too much power in a single person or company, noting “two ways AI progress could go very badly and that we must avoid.”

“First, we could lose control of the future to AI. This is unacceptable; we are unapologetically on Team Humanity, and AI must always serve people,” Altman wrote. “To ensure that, we need ways to ensure that alignment and safety techniques stay ahead of progress in model capabilities.”

The second, Altman warned, is that power could become concentrated in one person or company, allowing them to use extraordinarily powerful AI to impose their worldview on everyone else with potentially dystopian results.

“Avoiding these two threats requires walking a narrow middle path; for example, one country could gain too much power,” he wrote. “Another example is one lab ending up with too much power.”