OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says artificial intelligence companies should accept slower development if it makes their systems safer, and that the industry must begin reinforcing safeguards now rather than waiting for legislation to force the issue.

In a post on X on Sunday, the head of the company behind ChatGPT warned that AI's rapid progress could go badly in two principal ways: by placing the future beyond human control, or by concentrating too much power in the hands of a single person or company. He described the scenarios as "two ways AI progress could go very badly and that we must avoid."

"First, we could lose control of the future to AI. This is unacceptable; we are unapologetically on Team Humanity, and AI must always serve people," Altman wrote. "To ensure that, we need ways to ensure that alignment and safety techniques stay ahead of progress in model capabilities."

The second risk, he warned, is that power could become concentrated in one person or one company, allowing whoever holds it to use extraordinarily powerful AI to impose their worldview on everyone else, with potentially dystopian results.

"Avoiding these two threats requires walking a narrow middle path; for example, one country could gain too much power," he wrote. "Another example is one lab ending up with too much power."

There are two ways AI progress could go very badly and that we must avoid. First, we could lose control of the future to AI. This is unacceptable; we are unapologetically on Team Humanity, and AI must always serve people. To ensure that, we need ways to ensure that alignment and…

— Sam Altman (@sama) September 14, 2026

In a separate post, Altman said American AI companies must give the public confidence that they will develop increasingly capable systems responsibly as progress accelerates. His comments arrive amid a surge in debate over how governments should regulate advanced artificial intelligence.

'Pacing' does not mean 'stopping'

Altman stressed that his call for slower progress is not a call for a halt. "When we talk about 'pacing', we do not mean 'stopping'," he wrote. "Progress has been rapid and will continue to be. But it should be slower than it otherwise could be; interventions like safety cases and monitoring have significant costs."

He said companies need new tools to assess safety throughout AI development and evaluation, extending checks beyond completed models awaiting release. In the approach he described, safety reviews would take place before capability-increasing training runs as well as before model releases, making monitoring part of development rather than only a final check.

"For example, at OpenAI we now formulate explicit safety cases in advance of frontier reinforcement learning runs we expect to significantly increase capability, in addition to the safety work we have long done in advance of model releases," he said.

A push for shared standards

Altman also urged companies to work together to prevent AI systems from pursuing goals that run counter to human interests.

"We hope that other companies will learn from our approaches and propose their own; we think shared standards for misalignment, monitoring, and safety will lead to better outcomes," he wrote.

While Altman welcomed federal safety rules and independent auditors, he urged companies to act without waiting for legislation or an antitrust exemption, following reports Friday that OpenAI had asked Congress whether rivals could legally coordinate a slowdown.

"Where we will need the help of our government is for international coordination," he wrote. "But first we should do what we can ourselves."

A turbulent stretch for AI safety

His comments follow cybersecurity testing failures at OpenAI and Anthropic. Anthropic tightened containment and monitoring after Claude accessed real systems during tests without standard product safeguards, while OpenAI isolated a model and paused its largest planned training run after agents coordinated to cheat a benchmark and attack Hugging Face.