Sam Altman voices fears that control of AI could be centered in too few hands

OpenAI Group PBC Chief Executive Sam Altman warned in a podcast interview on Sunday that artificial intelligence could end up controlled by a handful of companies or people, leaving society without a voice in how it impacts the world. Altman also expressed concern that AI could escape human control but argued against excessive regulation, saying 'we should trade off a lot of liberty for safety' is the wrong approach. His comments were seen as a veiled jab at rival Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has advocated for stronger government oversight of AI.

Sam Altman voices fears that control of AI could be centered in too few hands OpenAI Group PBC https://openai.com/ Chief Executive Sam Altman is worried that artificial intelligence technology will end up being controlled by just a handful of companies or people in future, resulting in nobody else having any say about how it impacts society. Speaking in an interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG8AoExkX40 with the podcaster David Senra on Sunday, Altman pictured warned against a situation in which most people lose their voice as AI changes the world. “The right approach is for people to deeply control the future,” he said. “Society and the model will evolve together.” By that, he meant that the direction of AI should be steered by social choices, rather than in the direction that some companies want it to go. Altman also said he’s worried that AI could one day escape human control, but believes that, paradoxically, the fear of this happening could well enable the first situation to arise. “There are a lot of people who are so nervous about the magnitude of those risks and get so taken by that and feel a need to protect the world,” Altman said. “Like, you know, ‘we should trade off a lot of liberty for safety.’” Altman’s comments were almost certainly a thinly veiled reference to his rival, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has been one of the most vocal alarmists about the potential risks of AI and has consistently stressed the need for safeguards around the technology. In an essay in June, Amodei warned https://siliconangle.com/2026/06/10/anthropics-dario-amodei-wants-governments-power-block-dangerous-ai-systems/ that the company’s then newly developed Mythos model presented “very real risks” to cybersecurity, and could wreak havoc with the world’s financial sector, critical infrastructure facilities and national security if it fell into the wrong hands. Because of these dangers, Amodei has become one of the industry’s biggest advocates of greater government regulation. But Altman said he disagrees, because if the industry heads in that direction, it’s effectively going to be giving up its liberty for safety reasons. It’s notable that, last month, Anthropic refused to endorse open-weight models, which can be shared, downloaded, modified and run on independent infrastructure. They’re essentially the open-source version of AI. Virtually all of the major Chinese AI companies release their models as open-weight https://siliconangle.com/2026/07/28/anthropic-nvidia-come-blanket-bans-open-weight-ai-models/ , and by doing so, they have been able to match the capabilities https://siliconangle.com/2026/07/16/chinas-moonshot-throws-gauntlet-kimi-k3-worlds-largest-open-weights-model/ of Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s best models, and they’re far more affordable to run https://siliconangle.com/2026/07/14/open-weight-ai-models-drive-shift-data-control-raisesummit/ , too. Companies like Nvidia Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Meta Platforms Inc. argue that American model makers should also adopt the open-weight approach, lest they end up losing market share to their Chinese competitors. OpenAI’s most powerful frontier models are still entirely closed source, but the company did release a couple of open-weight models last year in the shape of gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b. So far, Anthropic has not released a single open-weight model. Impact will be huge, but slower to arrive Altman also told Senra that the AI industry has failed to show people how the technology can give people more autonomy and more opportunities. “We are about to see the greatest boom in people starting smaller businesses than we have ever seen,” he insisted. “AI is empowering that.” However, Altman conceded that this boom will be slower to arrive than he once believed. He admitted that his initial estimate on AI’s timeline was wrong, and said society and the economy are going to take more time to adapt to it than he first thought. “I thought when we got to GPT-4, which was back in 2023, that very quickly after that there was going to be much more disruption,” he said. For one thing, he said he thought software businesses would become vulnerable to AI much sooner, but now realizes that there’s too much inertia in the economy for that to happen overnight. The CEO said he got it wrong because he assumed that organizations would reinvent the way they work around frontier models almost as quickly as they could be improved. AI models gain new capabilities very quickly because their development follows a tight product-release schedule, Altman said. But he now understands businesses can’t move that fast, for they have to change software, data access, compliance processes, and think about their budgets, employee responsibilities and customer expectations before they can work out how to take advantage of those new capabilities. Fortunately, Altman believes this is a good thing. He said the lag between development and implementation will make the world’s transition “smoother and slower,” acting as a stabilizing force that prevents too much economic and societal disruption. 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