World Right to Fear AI, Says OpenAI’s Altman

San Francisco (GNP): OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has said the public is right to feel uneasy about the rapid pace of artificial intelligence (AI) development, even as he pushed back on growing calls for government regulation of the sector.

Speaking at a Salesforce-hosted conference in San Francisco, Altman argued that people should place greater trust in companies like his own to manage the risks responsibly, rather than looking to lawmakers for oversight.

Altman’s remarks marked his first public appearance since a widely circulated post by a former Anthropic researcher warned that unchecked AI systems could pose an existential threat to humanity within the decade. The claim drew swift reactions from across the industry, with several prominent figures voicing agreement, though few offered detailed reasoning behind their assessments.

Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei responded by calling for a slower, more cautious approach to AI development and urged governments to introduce stronger regulatory frameworks.

The debate has since split opinion among industry leaders over whether AI firms can be trusted to police themselves.

Altman said he was confident that safety measures within his company and the wider industry would remain ahead of raw capability gains, adding that development would be paused if that balance could not be maintained. Altman said, “I think the world is right to be afraid of this.”

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg echoed a similar sentiment, arguing that every AI laboratory has both the ability and the incentive to prioritise safety, since firms whose models cause harm would face significant liability.

Nvidia head Jensen Huang went further, stating that decisions on releasing new AI systems should rest with the companies developing them rather than external regulators, describing safety as fundamentally an engineering challenge rather than a policy one.

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Not everyone within the industry shares this confidence in self-regulation. Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark cautioned that allowing AI to remain a completely unregulated industry amounted to gambling with enormous risks.

Logical Intelligence chief operating officer Patrick Hillman was similarly sceptical, pointing to the low levels of public trust in technology companies. Hillman said, “If you believe what you are building is dangerous, show us what you are prepared to stop doing.”

Despite these divisions, leaders from OpenAI and Anthropic indicated that discussions are already under way to establish a shared, industry-wide framework for AI safety standards. Amodei confirmed that Anthropic is engaged in dialogue with other major laboratories on the issue, while OpenAI executive Chris Lehane said the company is working alongside peers, including Anthropic and Google DeepMind, to advance voluntary safety commitments even without formal government backing.