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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
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.