Sam Altman

key decisions about AI are made via democratic processes and with egalitarian principles, and not just made by AI labs. AI Verified source (2026)

When the frontier models are in the hands of pretty responsible companies, I think we can mitigate [risks] by the companies aligning their models and having good classifiers and good safety stacks. AI Unverifiable source (2026)

Once you see AGI you can't unsee it. It has a real 'ring of power' dynamic to it, and makes people do crazy things. I don't mean that AGI is the ring itself, but instead the totalizing philosophy of 'being the one to control AGI'. [...] The only solu... more AI Verified source (2026)

Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) [1] is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation ... more AI Verified source (2015)

First, it is vital that AI companies–especially those working on the most powerful models–adhere to [...] testing prior to release and publication of evaluation results. Unverified source (2023)

We talk about the IAEA as a model where the world has said "OK, very dangerous technology, let's all put some guard rails." Unverified source (2023)

We have long believed that AI should not be used for mass surveillance or autonomous lethal weapons, and that humans should remain in the loop for high-stakes automated decisions. AI Verified source (2026)

In the blueprint, we talk, for instance, about incident reporting that's modeled a little bit after how the aviation industry does things whenever there's kind of a near miss or any incidents, however minor, that kind of gets reported to a database s... more AI Unverifiable source (2026)

But then there is a long continuation from what we call AGI to what we call Superintelligence. AI Verified source (2024)

But the governance of the most powerful systems, as well as decisions regarding their deployment, must have strong public oversight. We believe people around the world should democratically decide on the bounds and defaults for AI systems. Second, w... more Verified source (2023)

There's not one big magic red button that blows up the data centre, which I think some people sort of assume exists. Verified source (2026)