No More Mr. Nice AI

Sam Altman impresses Washington and tech experts in his pursuit of becoming the AI equivalent of Steve Jobs. 

In May 2023, he impressed Democrats and Republicans alike by fostering communication between Washington and the AI industry and maintaining an open mind regarding regulation. However, the Sam Altman that testified to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in May 2025 had a markedly different tone .

It’s clear that the OpenAI CEO is determined to be more than the guy behind everyone’s favorite digital therapist. In Washington and the tech world, he has been adamant that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a universal tool with full human reasoning ability, will be achievable within the next few years, as long as the government stays out of his way. 

While no elected representative wants to be labeled as stifling innovation, they also want to avoid angry calls from constituents who blame AI for losing their jobs or their kids not learning anything in school. Not to mention, AI has become the preferred tool for scammers.

It’s also become a giant headache in the world of academia. There’s also the issue of AI hallucinations, where tools like ChatGPT provide inaccurate information and sometimes even manufacture fake scholarly work to back it up. 

When pressed, Altman told Senators he was open to looking at legislation with them, but he also routinely dropped warnings about regulation stifling his grand vision for Open AI. 

“I know there’s increasing pressure in other places around the world [to regulate generative AI],” he said, “but I think this is a tool and we need to make it a powerful and capable tool. We will, of course, put some guardrails in a very wide bounds, but I think we need to give a lot of freedom.”

He told the Senate Committee in early May, referring to his AGI ambitions, “I believe this will be at least as big as the internet, maybe bigger.”

Tech experts have warned that artificial intelligence is not capable of processing complex tasks beyond Italian brainrot and befriending lonely teenagers. 

“A system that’s better than humans in one way will not necessarily be better in other ways,” Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker told the Washington Post. “There’s just no such thing as an automatic, omniscient, omnipotent solver of every problem, including ones we haven’t even thought of yet.”

Also in May, Altman acquired iPhone designer Jony Ive’s startup OI for $6.5 billion in a share-swap deal. The two launched their new partnership with a bizarre video that provided great detail about their admiration for each other but little about their unspecified project that will be, “the beginning of the greatest technological revolution in our lifetimes.”

While Silicon Valley loves it when you think big— like, changing humanity big, back East in Washington, it raises some flags. 

At one point during his testimony, Altman laid out his vision for AGI to the federal government: 

“I can imagine a future where the US government offers an AI-powered service that makes it really easy to use all government services to get great healthcare, to get great education. You have this thing in your pocket, and if you have any medical problem, you get an answer. If you need to appeal something… or file your taxes or whatever, you just do it instantly. You have an agent in your pocket fully integrated with the United States government and life is easy.”

Not long after Altman’s testimony, President Trump signed the Take It Down Act into law, which criminalizes the publication and distribution of non-consensual intimate visual deceptions, including deepfakes. However, the issue of deepfakes being used for political or monetary deceptions still looms. 

Altman’s solution to these problems? Building “societal resilience” to fake AI-generated slop. Beyond that, the tech mogul didn’t have a lot to offer on how to curb unethical uses of AI. 

“None of this is rocket science,” he testified to the Senate. “We just need to keep doing the things that have worked for so long and not make a silly mistake.”

He may not have much practical information to share with the committee but he did take the time to paint AGI as something patriotic: “America is a nation of innovators, and we want to supercharge people’s ability to use our technology to make their lives better.”

So, the guy launching “the greatest technological revolution in our lifetimes” plans to just not mess up while creating an artificial intelligence with full human reasoning ability. What could go wrong?