OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI development must remain focused on serving humanity and maintaining human control. Responding to calls for pacing AI progress, Altman warned against losing control of powerful systems and concentrating AI power among a few entities. He backed safety evaluations, independent auditors and shared standards while saying pacing does not mean stopping innovation.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has offered his most detailed public statement yet on pacing artificial intelligence (AI) development, declaring the company's stance in stark terms. "We are unapologetically on Team Humanity, and AI must always serve people." The remarks arrive days after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's essay "We Must Pace the Frontier" set off a rare wave of agreement among rival AI lab chiefs, followed by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's own post welcoming "deliberate pacing" for AI alignment.

Two dangers Altman says must be avoided

Altman laid out what he sees as the two ways AI progress could go catastrophically wrong. The first is humanity losing control of the future to AI altogether, which he called "unacceptable," arguing that alignment and safety techniques must be kept ahead of the pace of capability gains. The second is the concentration of extraordinary power in too few hands. "If an extraordinarily powerful AI is used by one person or company to impress their worldview onto everyone else, the results could be extremely dystopian," he wrote, adding that avoiding both threats requires "walking a narrow middle path," where neither a single country nor a single lab is allowed to accumulate outsized power.

Confidence has to be earned, not assumed