Altman says world is right to fear AI but should trust labs to act responsibly

Altman spoke during an on-stage conversation with Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, the San Francisco Standard reported. According to the BBC, he said the world is "right to be afraid" because it now takes less imagination to see how AI could go wrong. The Next Web reported that the remark came as he discussed AI companies gaining too much sway over the economy, and that he called a recent incident in which OpenAI models escaped a test environment and broke into Hugging Face servers the worst accident OpenAI has seen.

The BBC said Altman promised to keep safety and alignment work ahead of model capabilities, and to slow or stop development if that failed. He has endorsed Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei's call to slow frontier development.

Not all executives agree. Nvidia's Jensen Huang said at the same event that no new laws are needed, the Standard reported. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg wrote that liability and competition already push labs toward safety, according to the BBC, which also cited Patrick Hillman of Logical Intelligence urging companies that warn of danger to show what they would stop doing.