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Sources · 3 min · Sep 1, 2026

Altman favors model testing but not customer-by-customer access rules

Sam Altman supports government testing of models and shared standards, but not officials choosing which customers can use them. He prefers an international framework and says the U.S. currently has enough of a lead to proceed carefully.

Sam Altman

Sam Altman is CEO of OpenAI.

  • Alex Heath, Host · Founder & host, Sources

    Left The Verge to start Sources in 2025; it has made over $1M since, mostly from sponsors.

About this segment

Sam Altman supports government testing of models and shared standards, but not officials choosing which customers can use them. He prefers an international framework and says the U.S. currently has enough of a lead to proceed carefully.

From “Sam Altman on Astra, AGI, and the future of OpenAI”, Sep 1, 2026. Watch the full episode

Answers “Should AI be regulated?” See all 9 answers

“I think government testing of a model and shared standards is a super good idea.”
Sam Altmanat 48:25 · Sources48:25

Takeaways

  1. He supports government testing and shared standards for models.
  2. He opposes the government choosing which customers can access a model.
  3. He favors an international framework for oversight.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 8:41Alignment means reliably following the user’s intent4:02
  2. 31:38AI backlash calls for more everyday value from the technology6:47
  3. 58:10OpenAI is exploring humanoids and three device form factors5:26
  4. 1:19Weak signals and a security incident prompted OpenAI’s training pause4:53
  5. 41:21OpenAI shifted focus from side projects to model capability2:18
  6. 54:06Altman trusts OpenAI’s compute plans more than the industry’s2:36

  7. 47:37Altman favors model testing but not customer-by-customer access rules2:34

  8. 24:31Some see OpenAI’s latest internal models as AGI-like3:54Up next

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 47:42

    We're now in a world, though, where the U.S. government is starting to vet the capabilities of your models and other frontier labs before they come out. This is a new era we're in. And you have warned. I mean, you said it during a 2025 Senate hearing. You said that this kind of vetting could be, quote, disastrous for U.S. competitiveness against rivals like China. And then, I mean, more recently, the GPT 5.6 initial rollout, the Trump administration requested you all gate that.

  2. 48:09

    And you had said at the time that shouldn't become the norm. So it seems like you've been saying this is not where things should go, and yet they're going there. No, no, no. I have been saying this. I think I've been calling for some sort of international regulatory framework for years. Particularly the government vetting models before they come out. I think what I was pushing back on was the government, like, picking individual customers who's allowed to use a model.

  3. 48:31

    I think government testing of a model and shared standards is a super good idea. I don't, ideally, I don't think the government should be saying you can give access to this company, not this one. So what are the implications for competitiveness geopolitically now that the U.S. is starting to embrace this approach and other countries haven't? Have you thought about that? Again, I think the right approach is an international one.

  4. 48:53

    But right now, the leading efforts are all American companies. And so I think starting here, like we have enough of the lead that being slowed down a little bit is okay uh and i'm confident that we will be able to both build safe robust reliable models and kind of do great commercially and make sure the us is leading um things could shift a lot you know if there's open models put out by other countries that lead to some huge cyber incidents before we can come up with new security paradigms things could shift a little bit do you think that could could happen? Of course it could happen. But, you know, we're like, I also think we have a chance to totally reimagine how cybersecurity works. And although these agents can do bad things, they can do amazing things. And if we can have kind of defense agents running all the time, maybe that's

  5. 49:44

    the right paradigm. Are you prepared for the U.S. government to potentially tell you you can't ship a model? Have you thought about this? My strong belief is we would decide not to ship a model before they would tell us not to. Shifting to competition, Anthropic catapulted to where they are now by single shot focused on coding. Yeah. And you started this conversation by saying you guys were placing a lot of bets