OpenAI's Sam Altman stated Saturday that he's "very uncomfortable" alongside group treating AI akin a god.
In a vaguepost on X, Altman stated that group who try to "ascribe religious power or a surrender of individual judgement to AI models" are a safety issue.
I am extremely uncomfortable concerning group trying to ascribe religious power or a surrender of individual judgement to AI models, and think it is a genuine safety issue.
— Sam Altman (@sama) October 3, 2026
Altman did not explain what prompted his declaration on X. It comes fair days following a discourse-stirring part in The New York Times concerning competitor Anthropic's gathering alongside religious leaders.
It additionally comes as one of OpenAI's safety leaders, David Robinson, discontinue and publically rebuked his erstwhile employer's own safety document and efforts.
If Altman's comments were a jibe at Anthropic, it would be the latest in a long-running beef between the two companies. Anthropic was started by OpenAI defectors and has portrayed itself as additional safety-minded.
Earlier this week, the Times reported that an Anthropic cofounder, Chris Olah, had held a figure of concealed meetings alongside religious leaders to conversation the company's AI models.
The concentration of those talks, attendees told the newspaper, was whether Claude power have achieved awareness and how Anthropic could inculcate morality into increasingly mighty and autonomous AI models.
"How do you assistance them be stable? How do you assistance them to mature? How do you assistance them be, you know, deeply moral?" he told the Times.
An Anthropic spokesman has not responded to a petition for comment from Business Insider, but told The Times that the chief ethical inquiry at the meetings was not concerning Claude's "suffering," and the topic apt arose "organically."
Tech companies akin Meta, Google, and Amazon have additionally approached top religious figures concerning AI. In April, representatives from those companies met in Rome to conversation protecting children in the AI era. They briefly encountered Pope Leo XIV, who has cautioned against an overeliance on machines and advocated for the humanity since becoming caput of the Catholic Church final year.
"If we are to evade losing our humanity amid a 'paradise of machines' invading and conditioning our regular lives, there is an urgent need for learning in ethical discernment and the capability to acknowledge the ethical good," he stated in an location to diplomats in September,
