What Sam Altman said, newest first. Changes are found by AI and checked before they show; every quote opens at its moment.
2026-10-06 · Fair Game by Vanity Fair · 10:47
“And we're going to as a society, I think have to just accept some fairly severe cyber incidents from open models in exchange for the liberty that comes with that.”He believes society should accept severe cyber incidents from open models in exchange for liberty.
2026-10-06 · Fair Game by Vanity Fair · 17:48
“Well, the fact that there's any at all, the fact that it is like a nonzero zero, uh, I think is something that we all should take incredibly seriously.”He believes the extinction risk from AI is nonzero and should be taken incredibly seriously.
2026-10-06 · Fair Game by Vanity Fair · 22:59
“putting this technology in the hands of everyone and giving people a legitimate new superpower relative to I think what any of us could imagine mentioned a few years ago will do tremendously more good than bad”He believes widely distributing AI will do far more good than harm.
2026-10-05 · POLITICO · 07:44
“we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.”He believes the world should accept some bad things happening with AI in exchange for its benefits and human agency.
2026-10-05 · POLITICO · 21:48
“I think the industry needs to figure out a way to address what the actual concerns are and right now I think a lot of people in the industry are being like quite tonedeaf.”He thinks the AI industry is being tone-deaf and political spending is not improving public perception of AI.
2026-10-05 · POLITICO · 33:38
“I think a lot of the current approaches are based in sort of the last era of thinking.”He believes export controls are based on last-era thinking and may not be the best way to handle China and AI.
2026-10-05 · POLITICO · 35:15
“I don't think it should be like only Americans get to benefit from the technology or have any voice in the future or have like a super lopsided concentration of power with the rest of the world.”He wants America to lead on AI but not to exclude the rest of the world from its benefits.
2026-09-30 · Every · 01:50
“I think there will be some areas of work where there's actually not much creativity required, and we don't care about the person doing it. And many of those tasks or jobs will be done by AI. But I think there's so much other stuff people want in the world. There's going to be no shortage of new things to go to go do.”He believes AI will leave no shortage of new things for people to do, even as some uncreative jobs are automated.
2026-09-30 · Every · 07:13
“I get sad to hear people talk about like oh, AI is going to automate everything. There's going to be no role for humans. We're going to be like house cats and the AI will decide how to reward us and tell us what to do.”He rejects the idea that AI will automate everything and leave humans as pampered house cats.
2026-09-30 · Every · 06:29
“One take on this would be that the renaissance was fundamentally centered around people and the industrial revolution was fundamentally centered around machines.”He believes the AI era is better understood as a renaissance centered on people than an industrial revolution centered on machines.
2026-09-30 · Every · 23:15
“This very deep belief that there are way more good ideas outside of our building than inside.”He believes there are far more good ideas outside OpenAI than inside it, which is why the platform is important.
2026-09-29 · OpenAI · 02:19
“We want AI to feel like that. We want to feel like magical things that it does without you having to ask.”He believes AI should feel like a helper that anticipates needs without being asked.
2026-09-29 · OpenAI · 52:40
“The best part of AI is not about making people cogs in a machine I believing the future in we get this right can be more like a Renaissance than an industrial revolution.”He believes AI's future is more like a Renaissance than an industrial revolution.
2026-09-29 · OpenAI · 53:02
“AI should beside about giving people more power in their lives and with everything we launch today we hope we can get do that future.”He thinks AI should give people more power in their lives.
2026-09-29 · CNBC Television · 00:58
“We still have discovery about how to align these models, and we have to solve that scientific problem too.”He believes AI safety is a science problem, not only an engineering problem.
2026-09-29 · CNBC Television · 04:44
“I think everyone doing something this important to society deserves great scrutiny.”He believes people doing work this important to society deserve great scrutiny.
2026-09-29 · Bloomberg Television · 07:27
“We just wanna get our feet under us, make sure we understand how to operate in this new way, be able to make some of these decisions in front of us without the pressure of being a newly public company. And then I think we'll be public at some point.”He expects OpenAI to go public at some point, but not while adjusting to new capability levels.
2026-09-29 · Bloomberg Television · 02:51
“Our belief is that if we continue to drive the quality up and the price down and really lead the Pareto frontier at every point on that curve, people will use our tools in tremendous ways.”He believes driving AI quality up and price down will lead people to use OpenAI's tools in tremendous ways.
2026-09-29 · Bloomberg Television · 09:13
“I think this has nothing to do with going public. This is just, I think, our responsibility for our mission and what we're working on”He thinks OpenAI should explain the risks and benefits of AI to the world as part of its mission.
2026-09-29 · CNBC Television · 03:01
“THE PACING DOESN'T ALWAYS MEAN SLOWING. AND I THINK THAT'S SOMETHING THAT HAS CONFUSED PEOPLE.”He says pacing progress does not always mean slowing it down.
2026-09-29 · CNBC Television · 03:26
“PART OF THE WAY WE WANT TO DO THIS IS TO REALLY OVERCOMMUNICATE AND BE EXTREMELY TRANSPARENT.”He wants OpenAI to over-communicate and be extremely transparent about what models are capable of.
2026-09-25 · The Independent · 00:50
“The best version of AI is not about making people cogs in a giant machine, or optimizing every part of life until the human parts disappear. It's about giving people more agency in an ever more complex world.”He believes AI should give people more agency rather than turn them into cogs in a machine.
2026-09-25 · The Independent · 03:30
“It doesn't matter whether people put the risk of catastrophe at 10% or 1% or 12% or 0.1% None of these levels are remotely acceptable and we should not train models that we cannot make an extremely strong case they will be able to keep under human control.”He believes no level of catastrophic risk from AI is acceptable.
2026-09-25 · The Independent · 03:51
“No one person or company or country should be able to use the most powerful AI models to impose their worldview on everyone else.”He rejects the idea that any single actor should be trusted alone with the most powerful AI.
2026-09-23 · USA TODAY · 26:42
“AI can either be more like a new renaissance of creativity and discovery or more like a new industrial revolution of upheaval and disarray.”He believes AI can bring either a renaissance of creativity and discovery or an industrial revolution of upheaval.
2026-09-23 · USA TODAY · 27:01
“I believe that people are much more capable than they imagine themselves to be, but have been held back by limited technology that was meant to empower but instead distracts and often steals attention.”He believes people are more capable than they imagine but have been held back by distracting technology.
2026-09-23 · USA TODAY · 30:14
“No one person or company or country should be able to use the most powerful AI models to impose their worldview on everyone else.”He believes no single person, company or country should control the most powerful AI models.
2026-09-16 · Global News · 01:14
“And I think the world is right to be afraid of this.”He believes the world is right to be afraid of the power AI companies could accumulate.
2026-09-16 · Global News · 02:22
“What I really care about is that we have got a great culture of accident reporting and learning.”He believes the AI industry needs a strong culture of accident reporting and learning, like aviation.
2026-09-16 · Global News · 03:02
“I think this is one of the most profound changes to how we use technology that I've ever seen.”He sees AI as one of the most profound changes in how people use technology, like science fiction coming true.
2026-09-16 · Salesforce · 08:34
“I think we're going to stay in an extremely human-centric world no matter how good the technology gets.”He believes the world will remain extremely human-centric regardless of how good AI gets.
2026-09-16 · Salesforce · 23:03
“I don't agree that technology is like neither good nor bad. I think the tool framing, the sort of like neutral tool, we don't care what people do with it.”He rejects the idea that technology is neutral, arguing companies' choices have real consequences.
2026-09-16 · Salesforce · 14:39
“we have to be willing to pace our development of capabilities such that capabilities always s such that alignment, safety and monitoring are always ahead of capabilities.”He believes alignment, safety and monitoring must always stay ahead of capabilities.
2026-09-16 · Salesforce · 19:53
“the strongest message I have is you have to defend against this impending wave of cyber attacks, I think we are not that far away from open-source models that can do serious damage.”He warns that a wave of AI-enabled cyber attacks is coming and companies must defend themselves.
2026-04-27 · TODAY · 02:27
“FOR SURE THERE WILL BE JOBS THAT A.I. DOES ENTIRELY AND SOCIETY WILL HAVE TO EVOLVE TO BE RESILIENT.”He says society will have to adapt as AI takes over some jobs entirely.
2026-04-27 · TODAY · 03:20
“WE ARE GOING TO PUT A.I. IN THE HANDS OF PEOPLE. EARLY, OFTEN, SO THAT SOCIETY CAN TAKE THIS TECHNOLOGY AND BUILD ALL THE THINGS ON TOP OF IT. NOW, THAT IS MESSY, THINGS WILL GO WRONG.”He thinks AI should be put in people's hands early and often, even if it is messy.
2026-04-27 · TODAY · 03:16
“I DON'T THINK THIS MUCH POWER SHOULD BE IN THE HANDS OF ONE PERSON NOR DO I THINK IT IS.”He does not think this much power should rest in one person's hands, and says it does not.
2026-04-22 · Core Memory Podcast · 11:58
“I think we have fallen in the frame as tech nerds of talking about we're going to build superintelligence and dot dot dot it's going to be great for you. And we've not filled in enough of the dot dot dot.”He thinks the AI field has talked too much about superintelligence without explaining what it will actually mean for people's lives.
2026-04-22 · Core Memory Podcast · 12:42
“I think what people really want is prosperity, agency that they're going to continue to have meaningful work to do.”He believes what people really want from AI is prosperity and a sense of continuing meaningful work.
2026-04-22 · Core Memory Podcast · 25:30
“we are not no longer that far away from a model that just knows all of your context. It knows about you. It knows about your life. It knows what you're doing. It knows what you care about.”He predicts models that know users' full personal context are not far away and will completely change how using AI feels.
2026-04-22 · Core Memory Podcast · 40:32
“Greg and I think it's obvious that people should prefer the first.”He thinks people should prefer a future of maximum prosperity even if inequality rises, though he understands the emotional resistance.
2026-04-21 · Pantera Capital · 01:41
“We are so hardwired to care about people uh that I'm not afraid for the future as long as we can tell.”He believes people are hardwired to care about other humans, so he is not afraid of the future as long as humans can be distinguished from AI.
2026-04-21 · Pantera Capital · 01:15
“we are also heading to a world now where there's going to be more stuff generated by AI than by humans. And I think there's a ton of reason for optimism for this new world.”He expects a world with more AI-generated content than human-generated content, and is optimistic about it.
2026-04-21 · Pantera Capital · 03:36
“clearly agents are going to need to be able to pay each other and move money around in all sorts of ways and that's one of the things I'm personally most excited about.”He believes AI agents will need to pay each other and move money around, which is one of the things he is most excited about.
2026-04-21 · Pantera Capital · 02:51
“people are really going to need this and really going to need to do this in a privacy-preserving way.”He believes people will really need proof of human identity, and in a privacy-preserving way.
2026-04-21 · Pantera Capital · 04:58
“I assume it will continue to scale over a number of years to get to like a real significant fraction of the internet. Um these things always almost always take longer than you think, but the the trajectory of it seems really good.”He expects World ID to scale to a significant fraction of the internet over a number of years.
2026-04-07 · OpenAI · 02:07
“The more time the the public, our leaders, the political system has to debate ideas before you really have to make a decision, the more likely you are to make a good decision.”He believes the public and leaders should debate AI policy ideas now, before decisions must be made, to reach better decisions.
2026-04-07 · OpenAI · 29:30
“I do suspect that we're going to have to make changes to how we tax like in a world where AI is doing most of the intellectual work in the world”He expects society will need to change how it taxes as AI does more intellectual work.
2026-04-07 · OpenAI · 30:04
“Capitalism is dependent on a certain balance between labor and capital and if that gets totally out of whack, then the current system is not going to work and there'll have to be some sort of evolution.”He suspects capitalism will need to evolve if the balance between labor and capital is disrupted by AI.
2026-04-06 · ARC Prize · 06:18
“I think the world is finally taking seriously and we've been waiting for this for years, that the social contract is going to have to evolve and maybe sooner than people thought.”He believes the social contract will have to evolve, and the world is finally taking that seriously.
2026-04-06 · ARC Prize · 03:53
“I think they'll have more agency and more will than any of us do, and they'll like they'll grow up expecting that.”He expects children growing up with AI to have more agency and willpower than previous generations.
2026-04-06 · ARC Prize · 26:48
“If we're in a forever deflationary world, I don't know how you're supposed to think about that as an asset class and what's going to happen.”He is uncertain how to think about debt and asset classes if AI leads to a deflationary world.
2026-03-11 · DRM News · 01:19
“I think at some point in the last few months, we really have crossed a threshold into major economic utility of these models.”He believes AI models have recently crossed into major economic utility.
2026-03-11 · DRM News · 04:47
“maybe that could happen by like late 2028.”He thinks more of the world's cognitive capacity could be inside data centers than outside them by late 2028.
2026-03-08 · TreeHacks · 22:15
“I think if you are a sophomore now, you will graduate to a world with AGI in it.”He expects current sophomores to graduate into a world with AGI in it.
2026-03-08 · TreeHacks · 21:22
“if companies don't adopt AI fast enough then they will lose to fully autonomous completely AI run and started companies and that will be a crazy destabilizing thing for society.”He expects companies that adopt AI too slowly to lose to fully autonomous AI-run companies.
2026-03-08 · TreeHacks · 31:22
“I have no delusions that an AI will not be a better CEO of OpenAI than me at some reasonably soon time.”He believes an AI will eventually be a better CEO of OpenAI than him.
2026-03-08 · TreeHacks · 07:01
“I think you should just work on whatever the sort of most interesting highest rate of learning highest impact thing you can is.”He recommends students work on whatever offers the highest rate of learning and impact, whether in school or a startup.
2026-02-25 · TOI Bharat · 01:23Changed view
“no one really knows, including us. There will be many surprises.”He thinks the impact of AI on jobs is genuinely uncertain and will bring many surprises.
2026-02-25 · TOI Bharat · 01:27Changed view
“some jobs will totally go away. Many jobs will not change as much as it seems like they should with AI”He expects some jobs to disappear entirely while many others change less than expected.
2026-02-25 · TOI Bharat · 03:58Changed view
“It doesn't mean that the transition is not painful. I expect for many people it will be very painful.”He expects the job transition to be very painful for many people and hopes society finds new socioeconomic models to ease it.
2026-02-25 · TOI Bharat · 00:40Changed view
“anyone who says they're only excited or only fearful about AI is I think not being very thoughtful.”He believes people who are only excited or only fearful about AI are not being thoughtful.
2026-02-25 · TOI Bharat · 04:31Changed view
“I think listening to old people is the biggest mistake young people make”He thinks young people should develop their own intuitions rather than trust traditional career advice or older people's predictions.
2026-02-23 · Diya TV · 10:57
“society is going to have to get reimagined for this world of incredible abundance.”He believes society will have to be reimagined for a world of abundance rather than scarcity.
2026-02-23 · Diya TV · 12:02
“I think by 2035 for sure we will have a hugely deflationary economy that the world isn't thinking about.”He expects the economy to be hugely deflationary by 2035 because of AI.
2026-02-23 · Diya TV · 32:14
“I think empowering everyone and having a wide distribution of power is the best fairest and safest path forward.”He believes democratizing AI access and widely distributing power is the safest path forward.
2026-02-23 · Diya TV · 48:41
“I think listening to old people is the biggest mistake young people make.”He believes the biggest mistake young people make is listening to old people's career advice, because the world is changing too fast.
2026-02-22 · APT · 01:57
“I think we will need to find new ways to teach and evaluate in school to make sure every kid is brought along.”He believes schools must find new ways to teach and evaluate so every child benefits from AI.
2026-02-22 · APT · 02:55
“I'm pretty sure that like a kid born today when they're 18, graduating high school will be able to do things that no one today can.”He expects children born today to be able to do things at age 18 that no one today can.
2026-02-20 · VERTEX · 07:38
“Every technological revolution has panicked about jobs going away and every technological revolution has found new jobs on the other side.”He believes technological revolutions always create new jobs despite panic about job losses.
2026-02-20 · VERTEX · 20:30
“I don't think there should be any one person or any one country or anyone company in charge of super intelligence, including the United States. I think that would also be bad.”He believes no single entity should control superintelligence and power should be widely distributed.
2026-02-20 · VERTEX · 22:07
“I personally think something way more towards the democratized version of that is good. We of course will need some regulation. We of course will need some guardrails.”He favors a heavily democratized version of AI with some regulation and guardrails.
2026-02-20 · VERTEX · 39:33
“In a world where you can kind of have anything human connection human attention human warmth will be one of the most valuable commodities and we will I bet we will care much more about that in a world with AI.”He believes human relationships and human attention will become more valued in a world with AI.
2026-02-20 · Jhand IITian · 06:33
“We find new things to do. We find new ways to express our creativity.”He believes people will always find new things to do despite technological progress.
2026-02-20 · Jhand IITian · 06:51
“It doesn't mean that the transition is not painful. I expect for many people that it will be very painful.”He expects the AI job transition to be very painful for many people.
2026-02-20 · Jhand IITian · 08:52
“Killer robots in the streets.”He believes killer robots are the most overrated fear about AI.
2026-02-20 · Jhand IITian · 08:58
“Zero-person companies.”He thinks zero-person companies are the most underrated opportunity.
2026-02-05 · TBPN · 20:33
“I am excited about sort of like assertion of humanity instead of trying to like detection of AI as a as a thing here.”He believes assertion of humanity is a better approach than AI detection for solving the bot problem on social platforms.
2026-02-04 · ExpovistaTV · 08:54
“I think the companies that are not set up to be able to adopt let's call them AI co-workers very quickly um will be at a huge disadvantage”He expects companies that cannot quickly adopt AI co-workers to be at a huge disadvantage.
2026-02-04 · ExpovistaTV · 04:17
“it feels to me like there is a new kind of security or data access paradigm that needs to be invented for this.”He believes a new security and data access paradigm needs to be invented for AI agents.
2025-12-09 · The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon · 04:22
“one of the upsides is, it is a sort of equalizing force in many ways”He believes technology, including AI, acts as an equalizing force in society.
2025-12-09 · The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon · 05:20
“The rate at which jobs will change over may be pretty fast. I have no doubt that we'll figure out all new jobs to do and sort of, I hope, much better jobs.”He expects jobs to change quickly due to AI but believes people will find new, better ones.
2025-12-09 · The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon · 05:47
“this has gone really well so far, better than I would have thought”He thinks society's integration of AI so far has gone better than he expected.
2025-12-09 · The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon · 06:21
“I hope never. You know, I hope just we have a relentless -- we, as the human species, we have this relentless drive to improve and make things better”He hopes technology is never perfected because humanity's drive to improve should continue forever.
2025-11-19 · Databricks · 02:57
“this feels like it's really the time for I think in 2026 2027 we'll see a huge transformation um of how enterprises think about this”He expects a huge transformation in how enterprises use AI in 2026 and 2027.
2025-11-19 · Databricks · 09:06
“This is I think this is going to become the fundamental limiter for adoption of AI in the enterprise. Uh it won't be about the intelligence. It won't be about the price.”He believes governance, not intelligence or price, will be the fundamental limiter of enterprise AI adoption.
2025-11-19 · Databricks · 10:34
“we are trying to figure out how we can do a someday do a model that is like the quality of GPT5 uh running on a you know one device open source W model.”He hopes GPT-OSS is not OpenAI's last open model and wants to eventually offer a GPT-5-quality open-weight model on one device.
2025-11-19 · Databricks · 11:35
“I believe that privacy and freedom will be two extremely important principles for how people use AI”He believes privacy and freedom will be extremely important principles for how people use AI.
2025-11-19 · Databricks · 13:40
“I don't think we're going to like run out of meaning or purpose or fulfillment or anything like that.”He is less convinced than others that AI will cause a crisis of meaning, though he expects the economy to radically transform.
2025-11-17 · Tucker Carlson Network · 01:53
“it'll be a huge up-leveling of people uh where everybody will be a lot more powerful”He expects AI to broadly empower people rather than concentrate power in a few hands.
2025-11-17 · Tucker Carlson Network · 12:31
“I don't think the AI should tell them that they're wrong or immoral or dumb”He believes ChatGPT should not tell users their personal moral views are wrong, even views he disagrees with.
2025-11-17 · Tucker Carlson Network · 13:17
“I always worry the most about the unknown unknowns.”He worries most about unpredictable societal-scale effects of AI rather than known risks.
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