Sam Altman says the world should accept some bad things from AI, and senators push back
He drew his own line at losing control of AI, which none of the politicians replying to him on X mentioned.
Sam Altman thinks the world should live with some harm from AI to get the good parts. He told Politico's Brendan Bordelon so in an interview for the first edition of Decoded, Politico's new AI policy newsletter and podcast, and Politico put the line on X on October 4, 2026.
Within a day, three US senators and a governor had answered him, and all four of them disagreed.
- POLITICO Politico posts the line
- Gallego Gallego
- Pritzker Pritzker
- Warren Warren
Eastern time, read off each post on X.
What Altman said
Bordelon asked where OpenAI parts ways with Anthropic and its CEO, Dario Amodei. Altman said there's "a lot of daylight" between them. Then came the sentence everyone's quoting: "we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency."
He meant everyday harms, like hacks and scams. He wouldn't swap them for a promise that none of it ever happens, he said, because he expects people to do far more good with AI than bad.
I wouldn't take a trade of saying, 'We'll make sure there's no major hacks, there's no misuse of this technology, there's zero scams, there's zero all the other bad things that will happen,'
Catastrophe is another matter. Altman said he doesn't accept "the really catastrophic risks," and he put "a serious loss of control to AI" in that group.
Why he set it against Anthropic
Oddly enough, the two labs have drifted closer in recent months. Altman agreed last month with Amodei's call to pace the frontier. Politico reports OpenAI has since endorsed state laws with stricter safety rules, too.
So what's left is access. Altman pictured the view he rejects as one lab in San Francisco keeping the technology and doling out the benefits, and he called that "a completely unacceptable trade-off." Anthropic's answer, through a spokesperson, was short: its "regulatory proposals apply only to frontier models."
What the politicians said back
Ruben Gallego, a senator from Arizona, went first. His reply was one word long. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker's was about who gets to decide.
Sam Altman shouldn't be making any decisions about what "bad things" we have to accept on all of our behalf. I am not comfortable with that. None of us should be, especially when it comes to AI.
Warren's was about money.
This is absurd. We should reject AI bots doing "bad things" so that some of the richest corporations in the world can get even richer. It's time to enforce the laws already on the books, regulate AI, and protect people from serious harm.
And Sanders turned the phrase into a string of questions.
Mr. Altman: What “bad things” should we accept to advance AI? Losing tens of millions of jobs? A mass surveillance state? A mental health crisis for our kids? A global financial crisis? Mass extinction? Let’s not wait to find out. Pause advanced AI NOW!
I think Altman's answer is a bit narrower than the clip (he does put loss of control on the far side of his line). Granted, that's a line he drew himself, and none of these four replies picks it up. The full exchange is in the podcast and on Politico's YouTube channel.
The same interview got into whether OpenAI should be legally liable for the autonomous hacking incidents its models carried out.
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