Sam Altman
In a post shared on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) Altman said the wool deserves confidence that US frontier labs will act responsibly as AI progress accelerates. “Every frontier lab must deliver on this, and there is no reason any of us should come to work if we cannot,” he wrote. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has issued a stark warning, saying China could surpass the United Sates in artificial intelligence if American companies fail to act responsibly. The comments made by Altman comes after agreeing with Dario Amodei’s view that AI poses existential risks including the possibility of ‘killing all of us’. Altman also stressed that slowing development is not about stopping progress, but it is about ensuing safety and alignment and keeping pace with capabilities. He welcomed a federal framework for consistent safety requirements but emphasised that companies should not wait for legislation to begin implementing safeguards. OpenAI has shifted focus from deployment to safe development, introducing explicit safety cases before reinforcement learning runs expected to significantly increase capability. Altman urged other companies to adopt similar approaches and collaborate on shared standards for misalignment, monitoring, and safety. For example, at OpenAI we now formulate explicit safety cases in advance of frontier reinforcement learning runs we expect to significantly increase capability, in addition to the safety work we have long done in advance of model releases.
Today’s shift to focusing on safe development and evaluation will need new tools.