OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the world should trust AI companies to keep things safe

Sam Altman wants you to know that he’s scared of AI too. He just thinks you should let him handle it. Speaking at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference on September 15, the OpenAI CEO made a case that sounds like asking the fox to design the henhouse security system: the AI industry should be trusted to regulate itself on safety because its leaders understand the stakes better than anyone else. “The world should trust that we are going to do the right thing because it’s the right thing and we feel the magnitude of this,” Altman told the audience. He added that he is “very confident in our industry’s ability to do this safely.” The self-regulation sales pitch Altman’s remarks didn’t happen in a vacuum. Days before the Dreamforce appearance, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for a deliberate slowdown in advanced AI model development. Altman publicly endorsed the concept of “pacing the frontier” on X shortly after Amodei’s piece dropped. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang also spoke at the event, reinforcing similar themes around industry-led safety standards. The backdrop here matters. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind have reportedly been engaged ...