Sam Altman Urges Public To Trust AI Firms Despite Growing Safety Fears

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has acknowledged that growing public anxiety over artificial intelligence is justified, while arguing that people should have greater confidence in the companies developing the technology.

Speaking at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Altman said the rapid advancement of AI had made it easier to imagine scenarios in which the technology could be misused or cause serious harm.

“I think the world is right to be afraid of this,” he said.

Despite those concerns, Altman maintained that AI companies understand the responsibility that comes with developing increasingly powerful systems and should be trusted to act appropriately.

“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,” he said.

His comments come amid an intensifying debate over whether the rapidly developing technology can safely be governed through voluntary measures or requires stronger government oversight.

US Senator Bernie Sanders and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon are among the figures calling for greater regulation, despite their differences on other political issues.

Altman has previously acknowledged the difficulty of creating effective rules for a technology advancing at such speed. In an interview with Axios published earlier this month, he said he had expected Congress to establish a basic framework for advanced AI following his 2023 testimony, but lawmakers had yet to do so.

The debate has intensified since former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon publicly warned last week that AI developers were effectively gambling with humanity’s future. Anthropic alignment researcher Evan Hubinger subsequently said he personally believed there was a greater than 10 per cent chance AI could cause human extinction within the next decade.

The warnings have fuelled fresh calls for the industry and governments to address AI safety as companies race to develop increasingly capable systems.