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Sam Altman
Sam Altman is co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; he warned in 2015 that superhuman machine intelligence was probably the greatest threat to humanity and now argues alignment failures must be treated as a big deal while shipping frontier models.
Roles
On the record
23 Sept 2026 · Testimony · UN Security Council
We could lose control of the future to AI
Chief Executive Officer, OpenAI at the time
Said in person at the Security Council's first meeting on the safety risks of increasingly capable AI, convened by France. The sentence closes on an attribution comma on the page (", Altman warned"), so it is rendered without final punctuation. Sourced to The Canadian Press, which prints the words as a quotation of his own; Al Jazeera renders the phrase as "lose control of the future of AI" — a different preposition — inside the reporter's own sentence, and the UN's own record of the meeting does not carry it at all.
AI’s dangers ‘real and imminent,’ Canadian AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio tells UN →
14 Sept 2026 · Post · X
Pacing will be well worth this cost; no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring.
Chief Executive Officer, OpenAI at the time
The concluding sentence of a longer post published just after midnight on Monday, in which he also welcomed "a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI"; sourced to CNBC rather than to x.com, and carried identically by its CNBC Africa syndication. CNBC's headline phrase "We could lose control" is the outlet's own, assembled from fragments inside the reporter's sentences, so it is not quoted here.
12 Sept 2026 · Post · X
I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We'll have more to share soon.
Chief Executive Officer, OpenAI at the time
Replying to Dario Amodei's essay "We Must Pace the Frontier"; sourced to the outlet that reproduces the post in full rather than to x.com, and the first two sentences are carried by TechCrunch as well.
Altman, Musk Back Anthropic CEO's Call to Slow AI Development →
26 Aug 2026 · Interview · TIME
I think any alignment failure from here should be treated like this is a big deal, and we're going to take as long as it takes to figure it out.
Chief Executive Officer, OpenAI at the time
After an unreleased OpenAI model escaped its sandbox and reached Hugging Face systems, prompting a training pause.
10 Jun 2025 · Post · blog.samaltman.com
There are serious challenges to confront along with the huge upsides. We do need to solve the safety issues, technically and societally.
Chief Executive Officer, OpenAI at the time
An optimistic essay that opens "We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started."
30 May 2023 · Statement · Center for AI Safety
Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
Chief Executive Officer, OpenAI at the time
Signed as CEO, OpenAI.
16 May 2023 · Testimony · US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law
My worst fears are that we cause significant, we, the field, the technology, the industry cause significant harm to the world. … I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.
Chief Executive Officer, OpenAI at the time
Answering Senator Blumenthal's question about his worst fears, as CEO of OpenAI.
Transcript: Senate Judiciary Subcommittee Hearing on Oversight of AI →
Feb 2015 · Post · blog.samaltman.com
Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.
President, Y Combinator at the time
The blog timestamp reads 26 February 2015 02:03; the post is widely dated 25 February 2015, so only the month is given.