OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2026, that the public is “right to be afraid” of artificial intelligence — and that the world “should trust” AI companies to handle the technology responsibly, the BBC reported from remarks at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.

“It doesn’t take as much imagination as it used to for [us] to imagine how this could go wrong,” Altman said, per the BBC. “I think the world is right to be afraid of this.” In the same appearance he argued: “The world should trust that we are going to do the right thing because it’s the right thing and we feel the magnitude of this.”

Self-regulation vs. a slowdown

Altman’s comments came after a viral post from a researcher who quit Anthropic claiming AI could kill all humans by the end of the decade if left unchecked — a claim some executives said they agreed with, while others called the fears overblown hype, the BBC reported. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has urged the industry to slow development and pressed for government regulation; Amodei also appeared at Dreamforce and said Anthropic is in “a dialogue with the rest of the industry” on safety standards.

With no major U.S. AI statute imminent, Altman said he was “very confident” in the industry’s ability to “keep alignment and safety way ahead of capabilities,” and that firms would “slow down or stop” if they could not. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, speaking at the same conference, said “We don’t need new laws or regulations,” framing safety as “an engineering problem” and urging labs to pause a release if they lack control, according to the BBC.

Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark told the BBC that leaving AI a “totally unregulated industry” was “rolling dice with immense risks.” OpenAI executive Chris Lehane said last week the company was working with other labs, including Anthropic and Google DeepMind, on voluntary frontier standards “with or without government support.”

When the people building the most powerful models ask the public to trust them because “it’s the right thing,” while lobbying against outside rules, the ask is the product: concentrated private power deciding what counts as safe enough. Altman named the fear; he did not hand anyone else the keys.

Sources