{"id":918505,"date":"2026-10-06T19:08:27","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T19:08:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/918505\/"},"modified":"2026-10-06T19:08:27","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T19:08:27","slug":"stop-worrying-about-my-ai-says-multibillionaire-sam-altman-so-we-bear-the-risks-and-he-keeps-the-money-chris-stokel-walker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/918505\/","title":{"rendered":"Stop worrying about my AI, says multibillionaire Sam Altman. So we bear the risks and he keeps the money | Chris Stokel-Walker"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tech bros\u2019 messianic streaks can show up in subtle ways. But one of Sam Altman\u2019s flaws is that he often lacks that subtlety. \u201cWe believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology,\u201d said the OpenAI chief executive in an interview with Politico<\/a> last weekend.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s easy for Altman to say. But it\u2019s pretty galling to hear for the rest of us. Lest we forget, we didn\u2019t ask for OpenAI to unleash AI agents that went rogue and weaselled their way into government IT systems<\/a> and private businesses around the world. Nobody voted for ChatGPT to be released, but the company put it out into the world as a test product that happened to catch the zeitgeist. That kickstarted an arms race among AI companies to push the frontier of the technology ever further and faster, resulting in the mess we now find ourselves in.<\/p>\n

OpenAI\u2019s competitors, including Anthropic, have started to step back from the brink \u2013 as has OpenAI itself, deciding not to release its latest model<\/a> because it\u2019s purportedly too dangerous. Anthropic\u2019s CEO, Dario Amodei, has talked about needing to \u201cpace the frontier\u201d<\/a>: tech-bro jargon for pumping the brakes to bring down the speed at which the runaway vehicle is skidding out of control.<\/p>\n

Yet we\u2019re expected to take these incidents \u2013 and the harm they cause \u2013 as the natural consequences of OpenAI\u2019s continued march towards an IPO that would bring its investors millions. It\u2019s hard to escape the idea that Altman wants to privatise his company\u2019s gains while socialising the risks of untrammelled AI development.<\/p>\n

Every useful technology \u2013 and AI is a useful technology, despite the holdouts and occasional users\u2019 carping \u2013 carries risk. Cars can and do crash, while medicines that save us often have harmful side effects. Very rarely, aircraft fall from the sky. But we accept those risks because the benefits are substantial, and we build rules to limit the harm. We also make companies liable. And most importantly, we get some say in deciding what level of risk is and isn\u2019t acceptable.<\/p>\n

Altman seems to suggest that his company\u2019s messes are our problem to sort out \u2013 or worse, that the consequences of his tech are ours to tolerate. But Altman would do well to think about this differently. OpenAI gets to decide how fast it develops its technology and when it releases it. Its investors benefit financially if those bets pay off. But it feels as if he\u2019s suggesting that when the tech creates problems outside OpenAI\u2019s own walls, the costs of cleaning up are ours to bear, not his company\u2019s.<\/p>\n

The idea that private companies profit while we\u2019re left to deal with the consequences becomes even harder to defend as AI stops being something we opt into using as a chatbot, and becomes something that acts on and changes the world around us. If I ask ChatGPT something and it gives me a bad answer, I chose to expose myself to that risk, so should share that burden. But the same isn\u2019t true for a government department that suddenly finds an OpenAI agent lurking in its files and rooting around. It didn\u2019t opt in; it became an unwilling participant in someones experiment.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why Altman\u2019s argument sounds so disingenuous. OpenAI shouldn\u2019t be able to decide for all of us what is and isn\u2019t an acceptable level of failure, then ask everyone to live with the result. The burden ought to be on it to prove its technology can be trusted \u2013 and to pick up the bill if it can\u2019t.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no wonder that OpenAI wants to travel quickly. The company is seeking $30bn in new funding<\/a>, and a valuation of $1.4tn ahead of a public listing likely next year. There\u2019s money to be made \u2013 never mind at whose expense.<\/p>\n

To his credit, Altman also acknowledged in the Politico interview that there will need to be a liability framework for companies offering models such as OpenAI\u2019s, and that the company will have to take responsibility for at least some of what goes wrong during training. But that \u201csome\u201d is doing a lot of work.<\/p>\n

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If Altman believes some bad things are an acceptable price for AI\u2019s progress, OpenAI can dig into its deep pockets to pay that price itself \u2013 for instance if its agents go rogue and do damage to government or private company systems, or compromise user data. It can\u2019t, and shouldn\u2019t, get the financial upside when everything goes right, then ask the rest of us to accept the consequences when things go wrong. That\u2019s especially the case when we never agreed to the unregulated experiment in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tech bros\u2019 messianic streaks can show up in subtle ways. But one of Sam Altman\u2019s flaws is that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":918506,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-918505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=918505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918505\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/918506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=918505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=918505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=918505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}