Sam Altman: AI power must not end up in the hands of a few companies

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said one of the biggest threats to the development of artificial intelligence is the concentration of the technology in the hands of a small number of companies. On the Relentless podcast, he described two possible paths: a free society in which people gain broad access to AI, and an authoritarian system that uses the same capabilities to tighten control.

According to Altman, attempts to restrict freedom in the name of safety often produce harmful long-term consequences. He argued that people should be given AI-based tools and allowed to decide for themselves how to use the technology and express their own views.

The comments came amid debate over how open advanced models should be. Major US technology companies backed an appeal against premature restrictions on the distribution of open-weight models. They argue that access to such systems supports competition and reduces dependence on a handful of suppliers. Anthropic has taken a more cautious position, pointing to the risks of misuse involving powerful models.

The release of Kimi K3 by Chinese company Moonshot AI added fuel to the discussion. The developer calls it its new flagship system: the model offers a context window of roughly one million tokens, and its weights have been released publicly. The growing popularity of such systems has deepened divisions in the United States between advocates of broad model access and those seeking limits on Chinese AI technologies.

Altman’s position is especially notable because OpenAI does not publish the weights of its most powerful models. He nevertheless says his long-term goal remains the broad distribution of machine intelligence — provided it does not lead to an excessive concentration of economic and political power.