Altman tells Politico the world should “accept some bad things” from AI — his split with Anthropic goes public
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Politico’s Decoded on Monday that the world should “accept some bad things happening” from AI as the price of keeping the technology broadly accessible — and that his hard line is “a serious loss of control to AI.” It is the sharpest public statement yet of his break with Anthropic’s stricter line on frontier-model regulation.
The interview, released Monday by Politico senior tech reporter Brendan Bordelon, frames the divide as a matter of philosophy. “I think there’s a lot of daylight” between OpenAI and stricter AI safety advocates, Altman said. “One of the differences between us and some of the stricter AI safety people is that we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency to use AI widely.”
He rejected the idea that eliminating misuse would justify tightly restricting access: “I wouldn’t take a trade of saying we will make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams or all the other bad things that will happen — because I think that people will do tremendously, orders of magnitude, more good stuff than bad stuff.”
The Anthropic split, in the open
Altman’s sharpest contrast was with rival Anthropic and CEO Dario Amodei, who has pushed for stronger safeguards on the most capable models — and, in a September essay, urged the industry to “pace the frontier.” Altman called the alternative — “this technology is going to get so powerful, and it’s so dangerous, that a single lab in San Francisco should have it and make sure nothing bad happens” — “a completely unacceptable trade-off.”
The divide is blurrier than the interview makes it sound. OpenAI has recently supported state legislation imposing tougher safety requirements, backed a bipartisan House proposal for independent evaluations of advanced models, and even endorsed Amodei’s call to slow development of the most capable systems. And Anthropic, through a spokesperson, disputed the suggestion that its preferred rules would protect established developers — saying its proposals focus on frontier models, the industry’s most advanced systems, while leaving smaller competitors room to innovate.
The backlash
The reaction was swift. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said he had “no dice” with the idea that “a handful of tech oligarchs get to make that decision for the rest of us” — and his state last week filed a motion asking a judge to bar OpenAI from developing new models without third-party approved guardrails. AI skeptic Gary Marcus accused Altman of “saying the quiet part out loud: suck it up, so you can make us rich and powerful.”
An awkward moment for OpenAI’s safety story
Altman’s remarks landed at a difficult moment. Over the weekend, David Robinson, a safety leader at OpenAI, resigned, writing publicly that “the companies building this technology aren’t being nearly careful enough” as they move from one product launch to the next. His view was endorsed by Miles Brundage, an AI policy researcher who worked at OpenAI for six years, who said he regretted helping spread the concept of “iterative deployment” — an approach that may have made sense when AI was less powerful but, in his words, “makes no sense at all after many deaths have been tied to AI.”
The interview crystallizes a debate that has been running inside research labs for years and is now playing out in public: how much harm is tolerable, and who gets to decide. OpenAI’s answer is that broad access is worth the cost, short of losing control. Anthropic’s answer is that the frontier needs firmer guardrails first. With regulators in Washington and several states watching both labs, where the industry’s two most powerful CEOs draw their lines may end up drawing the rules for everyone else.