9 October 2026

Sam Altman criticizes religious framing of AI and says some AI harms must be accepted

First reported

Transformer ran this on 9 October.

Sam Altman, head of OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT), criticized treating AI models as having religious authority.
He also said openly that the world should accept some bad outcomes in exchange for AI's benefits.
The only account in this material is a single short newsletter item, so the wider context is not available here.

Our read

Only one of the 30 newsletters, Transformer, covered this story, which was first reported on 2026-10-09. Our archive already holds three earlier stories on Altman saying AI harms are an acceptable cost, dated 2026-10-05, 2026-10-08 and 2026-10-10.

Earlier on this story

Oct 10Altman says the world should accept some AI harms for its benefits
Oct 8Sam Altman says AI harms are acceptable cost of progress
Oct 5Altman says AI harms are acceptable cost of broad access

Written by Newskeryx from which newsletters covered this story and from our own archive.

How it was covered

TransformerShakeel Hashim

Altman's remarks on Anthropic's religious scholar work and on accepting AI-related harms