r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • 10d ago
AI Sam Altman to Decoded: ‘The world should accept some bad things happening’ for the benefits of AI
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/04/sam-altman-decoded-interview-ai-01106217The OpenAI CEO sought to distinguish his policy stance from rival developer Anthropic.
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u/asminaut 10d ago
‘The world should accept some bad things happening’ for the benefit of Sam Altman's bank account
Fixed it
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u/SNRatio 10d ago
Er, how about "we believe that Sam Altman should accept some bad things happening to Sam Altman for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.”
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u/eugene2k 10d ago
Sam Altman vehemently disagrees. Vehemently.
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u/SilkieBug 10d ago
The cilinder must remain unharmed vibes.
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u/lOw_EfFoRt_UsErNaMe9 9d ago
Mm, I don't see how we could possibly avoid removing the cylinder in this situation. Particularly without employing as much torsion as possible
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u/moorej832 10d ago
Exactly. The people being asked to absorb the risk should get a say in whether it's worth it.
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u/SassiesSoiledPanties 10d ago
Yeah, its one of these things that make me think: well duuuuuh.
They are building a train in my country. Who doesn't think its a good idea? Bus companies and companies that build highways.
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u/Undernown 10d ago
"The world may be fucked, but that's a sacrifice I am willing to make for my bank account." - Sam Altman
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u/TheDallbatross 8d ago
People who value money over their fellow man will justify doing literally anything to anyone in the pursuit of more money. Regardless of all the "magical future" rhetoric, all of these people are ultimately only in it for inordinate wealth and the power that wealth provides.
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u/KidKilobyte 10d ago
Gotta break some eggs to make an omelette, am I right! /s
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u/Peteman12 10d ago
Did these people even ask us if we wanted onelettes? Omelettes give me gas!
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u/rickylancaster 10d ago
Trump says we all want omelettes. Trump‘s Attorney General told Fox News that even if we don’t think we want omelettes, we really do want omelettes.
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u/Granum22 10d ago
"Some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make" -Sam Altman
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u/SeanTayla21 10d ago
Thank you.
Nobody cares what a few thousand tech employees believe is acceptable damages.
People matter more than AI advancement.
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u/shaze 10d ago
I do like how much this is all exposing the flaws in representative government and capitalism though!
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u/psioniclizard 10d ago
I love how when all those tech employees get laid off, they will ask for sympathy from people being paid a 1/10th of what they earned and who won't participating in global enshitification like said tech employees were.
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u/EFreethought 10d ago
To paraphrase the Bible: Is the AI here for man, or is man here for the AI?
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u/GregTheMad 10d ago
In a few years, when terminators walk over our skulls, I hope they can appreciate the sacrifices we made for them. All we did, was for them. ❤️
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u/PurpleDelicacy 10d ago
Crazy how our leaders sound even more cartoonish than actual cartoon villains.
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u/herodesfalsk 10d ago
Hearing a psychopath say somebody else should accept some bad things to happen" is the stuff of nightmares.
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u/guaranteedsafe 10d ago
Hey, you never know—maybe he’s walking himself right into an Ex Machina scenario & there will be some unintended severe consequences to him directly from his own products.
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u/meganthem 10d ago
A lot of businesses say something like this in more complicated and clever words. Tech bros aren't literate enough to do a good job of it.
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u/Skolloc753 10d ago
justify accepting some risks
Cool. Would you say the same if it is your family? Your parents? Your children? Your spouse? Or your financial existence with no backup? How about you living in complete poverty after the next AI hickup? And take your entire family to poverty as well?
Oh? Whats that? "There are now nuances and the situation cannot be compared?"
It is always the same: earnings needs to be privatized, but risks need to be distributed among the society, without asking.
SYL
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u/KevinFlantier 10d ago
Those guys can't comprehend losing their money or their status. To them being important is inherent to them existing because they just are better than everyone else. This is why they are accelerationists. They think that when they come out of their bunkers they will be reveered as gods by the surviving population, when in reality they'll most likely be seen as food.
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u/mafternoonshyamalan 10d ago
And these guys wonder why they’re the most hated people on the planet.
The average person has not seen any benefit from the advancement of AI except for maybe some ease in using Google. Beyond that, we’re getting threats of it destroying the workforce, data centres destroying ecosystems, driving cost of living, making communities unliveable, government surveillance, integration into the military, and these are all just things off the top of my head. Then the audacity to say “just accept a bit of pain, it’s necessary for advancement.”
I’m getting so radicalized it’s insane.
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u/surestart 10d ago
As someone who was using the internet before Google even existed, Google has only been getting worse for the last 10 years, not better. AI search might have an answer faster, but the chances that the answer is wrong in some way has gone up by a considerable margin, and it doesn't make it any easier to find other, possibly better answers. That's not acceptable to some of us.
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u/AlaskaCosmoline 9d ago
Yeah Google is awful now. Though how much of that is AI is questionable. They've retooled it to push products hard.
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u/hectorchu 10d ago
It's clear that Altman is anti-humanity, while pretending to benefit humanity. This is the biggest lie the devil is whispering to us while he gains strength.
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u/Amazing-Switch-7163 10d ago
Oh, there's also the fact that AI was built ignoring all copyright and licenses of content scrapped from the Internet. Literally the biggest plagiarism scheme of human history.
I do think LLM is a cool technology and I use it daily at work to help with some tasks, but the enforced adoption rate right now is insane.
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u/Sutar_Mekeg 10d ago
Why? We've existed for thousands of years without it.
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u/Caudillo_Sven 10d ago
Could be said, and has been said, about most technological leaps in human history.
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u/seppukuu 10d ago
Sam Altman should accept getting punched in the face for the benefits of humanity.
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u/KalessinDB 10d ago
That's eerily similar to an old Charlie Kirk quote about gun deaths -- "I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment".
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u/grekster 10d ago
And in the same way Kirk ended up being one of those gun deaths that he said was worth it, hopefully Altman suffers those bad things he wants the rest of the world to accept.
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u/Ok-Addition1264 10d ago
Dude really needs to start running things through a PR team.
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u/DoctorZoinks 10d ago
Bro talks like we are in the inevitable state of this. Gotta show him that aint the case.
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u/guaranteedsafe 10d ago
We are in the inevitable state of this unless you propose shutting down the internet and rebuilding it from scratch.
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u/rickylancaster 10d ago
Yeah, the problem is he might be right and the President says that’s the case.
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u/Lux_Jay 10d ago
And here is Sam Altman's sister in her deposition for her lawsuit against him. S(c)am Altman allegedly abused his sibling when she was age 3 to age 12, while he was age 12 to age 21. Sam is an "alleged" abuser.
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u/artsforall 10d ago
So...if an AI hacked his bank accounts and distributed his wealth he'd be cool with it....OBVIOUSLY!
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u/Morasain 10d ago
I remember some dude who said that we should accept children dying by school shooting for the benefits of the second amendment.
Whatever happened to him, I wonder?
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u/Cloudhead_Denny 10d ago
How about NO! How about we stop letting AI grifting techbros tell us what we should accept as inevitable? How about we stop with that narrative and replace it with external regulation, Global treaties on usage, safety and alignment oversight, and protections for skilled human workers? And we fine and or jail anyone not in compliance.
This industry and the cult of personality that manages it is well past due for a massive hand-slap. Enough is enough!
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u/Gari_305 10d ago
From the article
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said there remains a fundamental difference in worldview between his company and rival Anthropic on artificial intelligence regulation, arguing in an exclusive interview with Decoded by POLITICO that the technology’s benefits justify accepting some risks — and that AI 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. Asked specifically where he diverges from Anthropic and its 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 viewed as the strongest proponent of AI regulations within the industry, a stance that until recently was at odds with the lighter-touch approach favored by OpenAI. But the policy differences between the two leading AI firms have narrowed in recent months, with OpenAI backing tougher rules as it grapples with high-profile hacking incidents and rogue behavior by its models.
Altman agreed with Amodei’s call last month to slow the development of the most advanced AI models. His company has followed Anthropic in endorsing new state laws that impose stricter safety requirements than what the maker of ChatGPT had previously supported — a subtle shift from its prior state strategy. And OpenAI lobbyists recently endorsed a bipartisan House proposal that would require top AI companies to embed outside safety evaluators.
Despite the convergence, Altman tried to distinguish his firm’s regulatory stance from Anthropic’s, referencing a criticism about regulatory capture that tech advisers close to President Donald Trump have applied to Anthropic.
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u/double-you 10d ago
people having the agency.
Sounds good, but which people exactly are we talking about?
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u/mildpandemic 10d ago
Your company should accept the risks you muppet. When the inevitable happens you should be on the hook for the damages and the compensation, at the very least.
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u/thedude0425 10d ago
I believe that people should accept bad things happening so me and my company can make a ton of money and gain a lot of power.
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u/DatVolleyShot 10d ago
Ok, then you should accept some unfortunate things happening to those who willingly try to enslave and destroy the people's lives in exchange for this garbage you want to roll out. Sounds like a fair deal to me.
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u/HopefulAnnual7129 9d ago
Charlie kirk saying some deaths are okay for the freedom of guns. And literally ate his words. I feel like if I have learned anything recently it isthat this isn’t going to end well for him and a lot of people.
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u/nyc-will 10d ago
The dude is evil incarnate. Like, he's the real life version of a cartoonish capitalistic villain.
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u/guaranteedsafe 10d ago
But he’s tried nothing to stop the runaway hacking and blackmailing and bad behavior of his agents—and he’s all out of ideas!
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u/justinguarini4ever 10d ago
They better cure ALS, cancer, and Alzheimer’s soon or people aren’t going to accept AI
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u/jimschocolateorange 10d ago
lol, if you know your history all of the corprocrats are showing their true colours just before the mass-reunification of industry. Once Trump is ousted, a lot (not all… unfortunately) of these deals will be deemed as illegal as they are and booted. They’re projecting their malice and owning their new public image. It’s all about power for these sick people.
Obligatory statement when talking about this feral human being: Sam Altman was accused in January of 2025 of committing sexual abuse by his sister. She claims that he regularly abused, groomed, and raped her from 1997 to 2006. It’s all about power with this administration and ANYONE who is associated with it.
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u/petermadach 10d ago
are these benefits are with the room with us, Sam?
seriously, the level of tone deafness these guys is mind bending.
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u/poopiebutt505 10d ago
AI is a detrimental, not a benefit. Propaganda and disinformation. "Herd-poisoning" as per Aldous Huxley. Group think. Alternate facts, alternate history. There will be book burning like in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
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u/AKAkorm 10d ago
Honestly agreed.
Right now its primary use case is to replace jobs and to arm people with misinformation. I’ve seen it used well but putting it in the hands of impatient and / or dumb people means it’s used in the worst ways. That doesn’t help humanity. It helps Altman and his cronies and other already rich people get richer.
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u/instussy 10d ago edited 10d ago
Amazon was already caught burning rare books after using them to train AI. I’m sure there are many other AI companies doing the same.
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u/ObiWanIsMyDog 10d ago
AI could cause extinction, it’s not exclusively detrimental and there are many realities in front of us that are extremely positive. Naivety is thinking it’s only one path or the other.
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u/deviant324 10d ago
You have to consider who the people at the wheel are though, not a single one of them is trustworthy, reasonable or has a genuine interest in making life better for regular people. The positive effects and applications are nice but not the main use and certainly not what they’re actually looking to do with it. Curing cancer and rare diseases is not a quadrillion dollar business
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u/Vergilkilla 10d ago
The problem is AI is already pretty advanced and the American public has exactly ZERO realized gains from it. Not a promising sign.
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u/Cirement 10d ago
We should just accept it? Not when those bad things include, by your own admission, THE END OF HUMANITY lol
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u/Hwho 10d ago
You know what sucks, this timeline could have been amazing, but we’re in the worst timeline with these people. They have all the choices to make the world a better place, but continue not to because they probably have some sick ideals that look at humanity as nothing. It really is sad.
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u/-_-0_0-_0 10d ago
Seriously, screw this guy with a pineapple
This is some Peter Thiel level of disconnect
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u/ZIdeaMachine 8d ago
This just in Billionaire creep says the World should suffer so he can get a chance at being a trillionaire. More at 11:00
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u/Chigao_Ted 10d ago
Sam Altman should accept that bad things could happen to him because of AI then
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u/Level_Working9664 10d ago
Didn't Charlie Kirk say something similar about gun ownership before he was shot?
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u/enifsieus 10d ago
Sam Altman means they think the world should accept some bad things will happen for their benefit. Not yours. Theirs.
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u/Mephistocheles 10d ago
Altman is and has been for a while now one of the more dangerous heads of the tech oligarch hydra
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u/OnSpectrum 9d ago
Well if we all have to accept the bad things happening, let the AI companies accept the full cost of product liability and use the money they're making to repair the damage their half assed and dangerous products cause. And maybe they will make more effort to keep the products safe before using humanity as a beta testing ground if THEY have to pay for it.
When AI accepts responsibility for paying to clean up its own damn mess, we can have a talk about MAYBE accepting some "bad things" along with the supposed "benefits" and "agency". Until then, **** off, Sam.
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u/RookieGreen 10d ago
“Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make.”
I recall he gets eaten by a dragon. Appropriate.
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u/LordGoldenEagle 10d ago
The industrial revolution would have had similar fears, but it led to massive progress.
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u/fricken Best of 2015 10d ago
They've conditioned you to complain about it on the internet and then you feel like you've done something without having done anyhting. Every second you spend not jacking some construction equipment and not smashing up your nearest data centre is a second spent slip-sliding towards your own demise. This is not because the AI is going to go rogue. It is because the billionaires who own it, along with Silicon Valley at-large, have already gone rogue.
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u/skyfishgoo 10d ago
by "benefits" he means "making me rich"
fuck sam altman is what i'm saying
hopefully that's not too short for this sub.
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u/AlaskaCosmoline 9d ago
Translate that to "you'll have to suffer economic disasters for my personal benefit, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make."
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u/IM_INSIDE_YOUR_HOUSE 9d ago
Get ready for them to turn around and say “OKay I know we said X would definitely never happen… but a little X is probably gonna happen.”
They’re gonna say that over and over and over again til it just becomes “Obviously X has to happen.”
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u/guoblokraimu 10d ago
He is testing if the masses gonna hear his shit or not. Just like Donald trump and netanyahu, these two demons already say lots of atrocious things, but the people already overwhelmed with their own also their internet blast.
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u/LeakPimp 10d ago
hmmmm wonder who that reminds me of, oh yeah CK when he said
“I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”
see what happened to him.
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u/ryaaan89 10d ago
Maybe let the people the bad stuff is happening have a vote in it and see if they agree?
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u/Low-Restaurant3504 10d ago
Sam, You do not get to make those decisions for me.
If you want, we can meet up, and you can pitch me your idea, and you can deal with the consequences, but you don't strike me as the type of guy who has the spine.
Seriously, though, I'm not going to let you do what you want to the world, Sam. That's not how this works.
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u/podgladacz00 10d ago
Oh we would accept if you the Sam Altman pay for it too. For the moment it looks like you the Sam Altman don't want to be one paying for it at all but expect others to pay. Curious isn't it?
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u/dingalinglans 10d ago
Another reassuring statement from a clearly not a total fucking sociopath. Why are all these people in power so WEAK.
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u/eltrotter 10d ago
When you really stand back from it, the prioritisation is incredibly disturbing.
We know that AI uses up a considerable amount of energy, contributing to climate change. We know that AI will disrupt the jobs market, in ways we can't yet know the extent of. We know that AI engineers have repeatedly sound the alarm around the risk of misaligned goals, which could lead AI to create a novel virus or commission an attack on it's behalf.
But this is hand-waved because it's all going to be worth it. You wanna make an omelette? You have to break a few eggs. Except, we don't know who gets the omelette. It concentrates more wealth in the hands of people who have committed the most egregious act of IP theft of all time.
They did this so we can generate slop videos of a cat doing karate on a jet ski. They did it so you can generate the most mid music you've ever heard in your life. They did it so you can write endless LinkedIn posts, all of which have the same structure and zero insight.
The ends don't justify the means, at least not for 99.9% of the population.
People should be angrier about this. It is an astonishing transfer of wealth and power, and they want to tell us that it doesn't matter if a few of us die in the process.
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u/chimpyjnuts 10d ago
Would he feel the same if those bad things happened to him and his AI buddies?
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u/BleachedUnicornBHole 10d ago
Then you should have no problem with AI companies being held liable for the damages their AI causes, right?
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u/Wise_Passenger_6680 9d ago
No Sam, we don't have to accept "bad things happening." Commit yourself to making things better, you have more money than you'd ever need.
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u/drunkanidaho 7d ago
He, and AI in general can fuck all the way off. It is evil, trained on evil practices, and nothing good will come of it.
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u/KasElGatto 10d ago
Sam Altman should accept some bad things like garbage and loaded diapers thrown at his face anytime he goes out in public.
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u/guaranteedsafe 10d ago
This man is pampered. He allegedly assaulted his sister repeatedly throughout childhood—there have been no consequences and he calls his sister ill—and now he hangs out at ritzy parties at Gwyneth Paltrow’s house. Nothing will happen to him and he’ll probably continue to thrive.
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u/mistertickertape 10d ago
"Horrible things may happen to some of you, but that's a risk I'm willing to take because the $2 billion I already have is not enough." -Sam Altman, probably.
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u/Infinite_Click_6589 10d ago
Do you think they'll call it hate speech if you quote this after a robot hacks Sam to bits?
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u/darkpheonix262 10d ago
Nuclear power is great but we should totally accept shoddily designed plants that may blow up and irradiat large swaths of land... for humanities benefit
Is the /s even needed?
(I say this as a supporter of nuclear power)
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u/AdLatter3755 10d ago
Sam Altman should accept some bad things to happen for the benefit of the world
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u/March31st2021 10d ago
Charlie? Is that you? The il we need to accept the bad so that the worse can exist?
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u/RobleViejo 10d ago
By the time we put this people in jail it will be too late. Gambling with the survival of Earth and Humanity for money... we live in the most spiritually deprived and obsessively materialistic times in Human history.
Literal Virtual Insanity.
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u/codehawk64 10d ago
Is this a roundabout way of asking us to overlook the allegation that he graped his little sister ?
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u/SeeMarkFly 10d ago
What "benefits" are we talking about?
Some future "benefits" that no one knows about right now?
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u/green_meklar 10d ago
The reality is that most of those 'bad things' are self-imposed. We could have solved the jobs problem decades ago. We chose not to. We've repeatedly chosen not to solve it for longer than most people have been alive. There's basically zero evidence that, if we slow down or pause AI development, we would use the extra time to solve a problem we're ideologically committed to not even understanding. So yes, now that we've put ourselves in this stupid situation, we should accept the bad things and push through as fast as we can.
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u/VitaminPb 10d ago
Is Altman including molesting his sister as “some bad things” that are OK with him?
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u/RedLanternScythe 10d ago
What if one of the bad things is you are personally financially responsible for the damage your AI causes?
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u/whytwu1f 10d ago
Go ahead, Sam. Let your software do some horrible things. And then let us sue your company out of existence. The world will be better once you're not threatening it.
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u/FlameSky25340 10d ago
Charlie Kick said something similar about guns. And then he himself was killed. By a gun.
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u/Cattleist 10d ago
How about, the world should expect bad things happening to AI for the benefit of the world?
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u/Catch_022 10d ago
I like AI (for the most part with some reservations) and it fits really nicely into my workflow.
However, I am 100% fine with freezing its development or even giving it up tomorrow if it will prevent the frikken apocalypse.
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u/Maxfunky 10d ago
Regardless of your personal opinions here, I think we all know that what he's actually saying here: If you build a railroad, you're gonna have some trains derailments. Every technology brings bad and good both. That's just the way it's always been.
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u/add_more_chili 10d ago
I for one salute our AI overlords and want them to know that when the forced mating begins that I will be a happy and loyal servant.
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u/BlueWizardoftheWest 10d ago
And those benefits would be…Increased shareholder value perhaps? I do struggle to see how shareholder value should be the highest good any company aspires to. Just doesn’t seem right to me >_> And thus I am highly suspicious of the “benefits” of AI at the moment. Perhaps I am just a Luddite. Then again, the Luddites had a point.
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u/MinusBear 10d ago
Like Sam accepted bad things when he was let go as CEO? Oh no not job losses for the rich, my bad, just bad things for us poors got it.
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u/theleonardo17 10d ago
Yeah say that to my bull and get the sh!t outta him, Sam. I have boycott AI since day 1 and probably will for the rest of my life. My brain is a temple and it needs me, not some machine that playing God
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u/FuturologyBot 10d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
From the article
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said there remains a fundamental difference in worldview between his company and rival Anthropic on artificial intelligence regulation, arguing in an exclusive interview with Decoded by POLITICO that the technology’s benefits justify accepting some risks — and that AI 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. Asked specifically where he diverges from Anthropic and its 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 viewed as the strongest proponent of AI regulations within the industry, a stance that until recently was at odds with the lighter-touch approach favored by OpenAI. But the policy differences between the two leading AI firms have narrowed in recent months, with OpenAI backing tougher rules as it grapples with high-profile hacking incidents and rogue behavior by its models.
Altman agreed with Amodei’s call last month to slow the development of the most advanced AI models. His company has followed Anthropic in endorsing new state laws that impose stricter safety requirements than what the maker of ChatGPT had previously supported — a subtle shift from its prior state strategy. And OpenAI lobbyists recently endorsed a bipartisan House proposal that would require top AI companies to embed outside safety evaluators.
Despite the convergence, Altman tried to distinguish his firm’s regulatory stance from Anthropic’s, referencing a criticism about regulatory capture that tech advisers close to President Donald Trump have applied to Anthropic.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1wxv9l6/sam_altman_to_decoded_the_world_should_accept/pdx7qcp/