Sam Altman says he's worried about AI being controlled by a few powerful players

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the power of AI could become concentrated among a handful of players.
• Altman said fears about AI safety could lead people to trade their liberty.
• He said AI should instead empower individuals and fuel a boom in small businesses.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he worries that AI will one day be controlled by a handful of companies, models, or people, leaving the vast majority of consumers without a say in how the technology shapes the world.

"The right approach is to say we want people deeply in control of the future," Altman told David Senra on the "Founders Podcast," which was released on Sunday. "Society and the models are going to co-evolve."

The other possibility Altman said he worries about is AI breaking free from its human handlers. Paradoxically, Altman said a fear of the latter possibility could lead to an actualization of the former.

"There are a lot of people who are so nervous about the magnitude of those risks and get so taken by that and feel a need to protect the world," he said. "Like, you know, 'we should trade off a lot of liberty for safety.'"

Altman was most likely thinking about Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

Amodei has warned on podcasts, in essays, and in company blog posts, about the dangers posed by AI's rapid development. In a June essay, Amodei wrote that the company's new Mythos models present "very real risks" to cybersecurity, the financial sector, critical infrastructure, and national security.

Amodei has used those warnings to advocate for a greater government role in regulating AI. In Altman's view, that might be trading liberty for safety.

Anthropic was also the only major AI company last month not to sign a letter endorsing open-weight models, which allow developers to share, download, modify, and deploy AI models on their own infrastructure.

China has embraced the open-weight model, which has allowed it to keep up with Silicon Valley at a fraction of the cost. Some in the United States, including Nvidia, Meta, and Microsoft, have argued that America needs to do the same or risk ceding ground to its rival in the AI race.

OpenAI, though it has not released the source code of its frontier models, did release two open-weight models last year, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b.

During the podcast, Altman also said AI leaders in the United States have failed to demonstrate to the public how the technology can give people greater autonomy over their lives.

"We are about to see the greatest boom in people starting smaller businesses than we have ever seen," he said. "I think AI is empowering that."