On October 3, Sam Altman posted a message on X saying he’s getting worried about people treating AI like a god. He wrote he is “very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models,” and called it a “real safety issue.”
Altman did not specifically mention anyone in the post. His comments followed recent reports that some AI labs have begun engaging with religious and philosophical questions in their research.
What made Altman speak out
In late September, the New York Times reported that Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah had been meeting with religious and philosophical scholars to talk about model welfare and whether AI systems like Claude could one day be conscious. The company’s internal constitution for Claude, which addresses those same questions, is known inside the lab as the “Soul Doc.”
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Altman’s post came days after that report. He described treating AI as a conscious or spiritual being as a safety issue in itself, saying it could affect the judgment of the people building these systems.
In September, he had already warned the United Nations about “losing control of the future to AI” and the risks involved in letting too few hands hold on to so much technological power, IPI Global Observatory reported.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman criticized rival labs for treating AI models as potentially conscious beings.NurPhoto / Getty Images
Where Anthropic sits in the debate
The founders of Anthropic were actually former OpenAI employees. They left OpenAI because they felt that the company was advancing models too fast without paying enough attention to safety. When they founded Anthropic, they built Claude AI, which uses something they call constitutional AI to write ethical rules directly into the model.
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Other tech leaders have shared their views on the broader question. Microsoft AI chief executive Mustafa Suleyman has publicly supported a humanist view, arguing that machines should support human choices, not replace them. Pope Leo XIV, who has been outspoken on AI, recently wrote on X that there is an “ontological difference” between human art and machine-generated work, adding that “algorithms lack the spark of humanity.”
What this means for AI investors
OpenAI needs regulators and large enterprise buyers to see its products as reliable business software. If governments start writing rules around AI consciousness or moral status, the labs that lean into those ideas could have to wait longer to launch new products and face additional legal costs for such practices.
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Microsoft is OpenAI’s biggest investor, and most companies that want to use OpenAI’s tools buy them through Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. Also, OpenAI continues to see departures from its safety team. The company’s safety leader David Robinson resigned early this month and publicly criticized its risk practices on the way out.
What to watch next
Over the next few months, pay attention to how regulators in the United States and Europe react to the growing debate. Also, watch to see if any more safety researchers leave the company like David Robinson.
If you use ChatGPT or Claude in your work, or to manage your portfolio, it might be better to have a human involved in the process, because these tools can sometimes sound confident even when they are wrong.
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