Opinion: Sam Altman’s AI risk bargain asks the public to pay the price

Sam Altman’s AI risk bargain is simple. Accept some bad things, and enjoy the benefits. This column argues that the public never signed that contract.

OpenAI’s chief executive made the case in an interview with Politico’s Decoded newsletter on 4 October, as reported by Forbes and Quartz. He said the technology will bring “orders of magnitude more” good uses than harmful ones. He also drew a line between OpenAI’s lighter-touch view of regulation and Anthropic’s more cautious stance.

The AI risk bargain has a missing party

Who accepts the bad things? Not the executive. A bargain needs the consent of those who bear its cost. Patients, workers and children did not sign this one. They will meet the harm first.

I do not dispute that AI can do good. Tools that help scientists and clinicians matter. The question is who pays when a system fails and who decides how much failure is tolerable. A chief executive should not answer that alone. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made a similar objection, according to Forbes, and he is not an obvious ally of the regulatory camp.

Altman is right about one thing. Human agency matters. But agency without information is not agency. People cannot weigh a risk that firms will not measure or disclose. Regulators are already asking hard questions, as in our report on the FTC probe into OpenAI, Anthropic and METR.

Free thought means testing claims. “Trust us, the benefits will outweigh the harms” is a claim, not evidence. It deserves the same scepticism we apply to any confident promise.

So ask for the boring things. Independent audits. Mandatory incident reports. Clear liability when products injure people. These rules do not stop progress. They let the public share in the bargain rather than merely fund it.

None of this requires panic. It requires adults in the room who are not selling the product. Democracies have regulated risky technologies before, and they survived the paperwork.

This is an opinion column. Fact basis: Politico Decoded interview (4 October 2026) as reported by Forbes and Quartz. Quotations are brief extracts.