OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the public is "right to be afraid" of artificial intelligence but urged the world to trust AI companies to manage the risks themselves. Speaking Tuesday at a Salesforce conference in San Francisco, Altman acknowledged the technology's rapid progress has made its potential dangers easier to imagine, while pushing back against calls for government regulation.
"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 said. His comments come amid intensifying scrutiny of the industry, fueled in part by a viral post from a former Anthropic researcher who claimed AI could "kill all humans" by the end of the decade if left unchecked.
Self-regulation vs. government oversight
The debate over who should govern AI development has split both the tech industry and political figures. Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argued Tuesday that AI firms can and should regulate themselves. Huang called safety an "engineering problem" and said companies should "take a pause" if they lose confidence in a product. "We don't need new laws or regulations," Huang said.
Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg weighed in on X, writing that every AI lab has the incentive "to take its own actions" toward safety. "Labs face significant liability if their models cause harm, so they have a strong incentive to prevent this as well," he wrote.
That position has drawn sharp criticism. Senator Bernie Sanders said decisions about AI had been left to "a handful of the richest people in the world," while former White House strategist Steve Bannon said the public could not trust tech oligarchs to regulate themselves. Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark told the BBC that leaving AI as a "totally unregulated industry" was "rolling dice with immense risks."
Congress stalls on AI legislation
Altman told Axios earlier this month that he had expected Congress to create a "basic framework" for advanced AI after his 2023 testimony. That has not happened. Lawmakers returned from summer break Monday, but new safety legislation is unlikely to emerge soon. The House enters recess again at the end of the week ahead of November's midterm elections, and there is no consensus within either party on how regulation should work.
Altman suggested legislators have struggled to keep pace without "slow[ing] down innovation." Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic executives said they have begun working toward an industry-wide agreement on safety standards. OpenAI executive Chris Lehane said last week the company was building "a voluntary effort now, with or without government support," alongside Anthropic and Google DeepMind.
Industry pioneers push for external oversight
Not all AI leaders agree with the self-regulation approach. Yoshua Bengio, one of the pioneers of modern AI, posted on X that "ambitious efforts outside the for-profit sector" were needed to "avert the worst risks from AI." Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for the pace of AI development to slow and urged governments to regulate the industry.
Patrick Hillman, chief operating officer of Logical Intelligence, noted the credibility gap tech companies face. "The only institution that Americans might trust less than Washington these days is Silicon Valley. I have worked and lived in both and I assure you both have earned this scepticism," Hillman said. He challenged AI leaders directly: "If you believe what you are building is dangerous, show us what you are prepared to stop doing."
Amodei, speaking at the same conference Tuesday, said the biggest surprise of the AI boom was not how the technology advanced, but its broader impact. "We didn't appreciate that it would lead to companies growing so fast, and how quickly they would become central to things," he said.
Why this matters for IT and development professionals
The regulatory vacuum means developers and IT teams building on AI platforms face uncertainty about future compliance requirements. If voluntary industry standards emerge before federal legislation, companies using ChatGPT updates and training resources will need to track which safety commitments their vendors have made - and which they have not. For teams integrating AI into production systems, the alignment problem Altman referenced is not abstract: it translates directly into decisions about model selection, output filtering, and liability exposure. The internal debate among AI executives also signals that development pace may shift, with potential pauses affecting product roadmaps and API availability. Professionals working in AI for IT and Development should monitor whether voluntary safety agreements create new technical requirements or constraints on the tools they deploy.
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