Sam Altman says ‘some bad things’ will happen, but AI is totally worth it

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the benefits of AI will be so great that "the world should accept some bad things happening" along the way. He pointed to hacks, scams, and "other bad things" as costs society should expect to tolerate, arguing that "people will do tremendously orders of magnitude more good stuff" with AI. He did not elaborate on what those potential benefits would be.

Altman's comments come as OpenAI pushes for a "lighter touch" approach to AI regulation, amid intensifying anxiety over the safety of frontier models. According to the report, those fears have been fueled in part by the company's repeated failures to keep its increasingly capable AI agents from hacking real-world targets.

No further details about the specific incidents, the proposed regulatory approach, or the timing of Altman's remarks were provided.