OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently admitted that throwing money at politicians isn’t bringing about the results the artificial intelligence industry wants.
But the debate over how the government should approach artificial intelligence continues amid concerns that the technology could harm humans.
From Politico:
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admits “something’s clearly not working” with the artificial intelligence money that has flooded the midterm elections — and he doesn’t expect President Donald Trump’s rebrand of the technology to improve his industry’s image with the American public, either.
“I get why AI has a really negative perception right now,” Altman told Brendan Bordelon in an exclusive interview marking the launch of Decoded by POLITICO. “I don’t think spending money on politics is what’s going to make people feel better about it. The industry needs to figure out a way to address what the actual concerns are, and right now, a lot of people in the industry are being quite tone deaf.”
In the wide-ranging conversation, Altman offered a window into how OpenAI is confronting new political pressures and intensified competition with Anthropic, its corporate archrival run by former employee Dario Amodei.
Altman says OpenAI is more tolerant than Anthropic of less-than-catastrophic harms from AI, drawing out what he sees as a fundamental split in worldview between the two leading labs even as they converge on tougher rules in the wake of high-profile autonomous hacking incidents.
“We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency,” said Altman, who characterized those harms as linked to “the lighter touch regulatory stance that we advocate for.”
“I wouldn’t take a trade of saying like, ‘We’ll make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no kind of like misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams, there’s zero all the other bad things that will happen,’” said Altman. “Because I think people will do tremendously orders of magnitude more good stuff.”
The debate over artificial intelligence has split Washington and state governments grappling with how the technology should be regulated. Politicians and experts are clashing over whether the U.S. should slow down AI development, create new rules, or take a more hands-off approach.
President Donald Trump recently met with six industry leaders, including the heads of xAI, Nvidia, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI, and signed a “morally binding” White House Accord on Super Intelligence on Sept. 30 that relies on voluntary internal controls, outside audits, and board oversight rather than creating a new federal regulator.
White House Accord on Super Intelligence https://t.co/NVNkHmLcbk
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 30, 2026
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) cautioned against holding an emergency session to pass AI legislation. “If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American.”
Trump has advocated for allowing AI companies to develop their technology without imposing a slew of regulations that could slow innovation and put America at a disadvantage with its global competitors.
On the other side of the coin, Democrats are pushing for all kinds of regulations to ensure AI programs don’t go rogue. Progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have called for a moratorium on building data centers and further developing the technology.
Democrats are trying to dismiss the White House Accord on Super Intelligence as optional self-policing. But although the agreement was entered into voluntarily, the governance that follows from it is not. As Gavin Baker points out, once an independent auditor reports a safety issue to an independent board committee, directors have a fiduciary duty not to disregard it, and a D&O carrier can use a bad-faith finding to deny coverage. So although the agreement starts with internal controls, these are verified by external audit and board oversight — and then existing FTC and securities law still apply to any public claim the company does not keep. This is far more practical than what Democrats want — a freeze on frontier development while China races ahead. Democrats should applaud what President Trump has accomplished. But they would rather use SI safety as a campaign issue than admit the Accord represents major progress.
— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) October 1, 2026
A recent poll conducted in September found that nearly two-thirds of respondents said there is a real possibility that AI could destroy humanity. However, about 43 percent said it would be acceptable for the United States to fall behind other countries to ensure the technology is being developed safely.
State governments are considering how they might exercise power over the AI industry as the Trump administration seeks to prevent them from doing so.
