Altman: Overreacting to AI safety risks creating a zero-agency surveillance dystopia
Sam Altman · Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup" · Y Combinator · Jul 28, 2026 · at 36:58
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discusses potential failure modes and dystopian futures enabled by AI with YC President Garry Tan at Startup School 2026.
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“One dystopia that I'm particularly nervous about 10 years from now is we overreact to AI safety, and so we say, look, everyone, you're gonna get a cure for cancer, you're gonna have material abundance, but you will have no freedom, you will have no agency, it will be a perfect surveillance state, there will be no privacy, and that's what it, you're gonna get great comfort, but you will have, there will be nothing left in the world for you to really do, nothing that really matters, you'll just kind of live at the, You know, service of the AI giving you material wealth.”
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