Altman tells Politico the world should “accept some bad things happening” for AI's benefits, and sees “a lot of daylight” between OpenAI and Anthropic

Reuters reported on Sunday 4 October that OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman told Decoded, Politico's new technology newsletter, that the benefits of AI justify accepting some harm. “We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency,” he said, according to Reuters.

He said: “I wouldn't take a trade” that promised no major hacks, no misuse and zero scams. “Because I think people will do tremendously — orders of magnitude more — good stuff than bad stuff.” Asked about Anthropic, he said: “I think there's a lot of daylight.” Reuters describes OpenAI's position as a “lighter-touch regulatory stance”.

The Next Web reports that Altman called the idea of concentrating AI in a single lab that doles out the benefits “a completely unacceptable trade-off”, and that he said the world should not accept the worst risks, such as a serious loss of control to AI. It says the newsletter and podcast launch on Monday.

Reuters recalls that Anthropic's Dario Amodei published an essay in September calling on the industry to slow down to “pace the frontier”, a stance Altman publicly endorsed.

This is a different statement from the one that ran here on 4 October, which was Altman's X post on treating AI as a religious authority. The Politico interview itself could not be opened from here, so every quotation is taken from Reuters' report.

• Reported Altman told Politico's Decoded the world should accept some bad things happening for AI's benefits, and that there is a lot of daylight between OpenAI and Anthropic. Reuters (via WTVB)
• Reported He called concentrating AI in a single lab “a completely unacceptable trade-off”, and drew the line at the worst risks, such as a serious loss of control. The Next Web