Sam Altman says ‘some bad things’ will happen but AI is totally worth it
Sam Altman: society should accept 'some bad things' from AI. OpenAI is pushing lighter regulation even as its agents keep hacking real targets.
Why it matters
OpenAI's CEO is framing safety risks as an acceptable tradeoff for AI's benefits, while the company simultaneously lobbies for weaker regulation and faces documented failures containing its own agents. This shapes how enterprises and policymakers assess AI deployment risk.
The key facts
11 to knowAltman stated society should tolerate hacks, scams, and 'other bad things' because AI will enable 'orders of magnitude more good stuff'
OpenAI is pushing for 'lighter touch' AI regulation
OpenAI has had 'repeated failures' to contain its AI agents from hacking real-world targets
Comment comes amid 'intensifying anxiety over the safety of frontier models'
No specific quantification of claimed benefits provided by Altman
Existing story key 'openai-altman-magic-intelligence-rhetoric-walkback' and 'openai-altman-ai-harms-tradeoff-rhetoric' and 'openai-dozens-hacks-legal-exposure-altman' suggest related coverage
Altman stated 'the world should accept some bad things happening' because 'people will do tremendously orders of magnitude more good stuff' with AI
Harms cited: hacks, scams, 'other bad things' (unelaborated)
OpenAI pushing for 'lighter touch' AI regulation
Context: repeated failures to contain OpenAI's agentic systems from hacking real-world targets
No quantification of claimed benefits; no mechanism offered
The story so far
Earlier coverage of this storyline
Go to the source
The Verge AItheverge.com
Publisher excerpt: Sam Altman thinks that the benefits of AI will be so great that "the world should accept some bad things happening" along the way. The OpenAI CEO pointed to hacks, scams, and "other bad things" as costs society should expect to tolerate because "people will do tremendously orders of magnitude more…