Sam Altman calls Trump's AI accord 'a good start,' says more is needed
In two Vanity Fair interviews published on 5 October, Sam Altman called the superintelligence accord signed by President Donald Trump and AI executives "a good start" and "much better than nothing," while saying more will be needed over time. He said the accord "has no real power" and works mainly through social pressure and peer pressure among companies. Altman also said OpenAI recently paused a model training run to make more progress on alignment and monitorability, and that GPT-6.1 Astra was ready but held back because it tipped too far toward accident risk. He wants clear accident reporting, pre-release standards and a liability framework, and believes the US and China could agree on shared safety standards with a way to verify compliance.
Altman's remarks signal that leading labs see voluntary self-regulation as insufficient and are willing to hold back frontier models on safety grounds, a stance that will shape the regulatory debate.
Sam Altman said the superintelligence accord that President Donald Trump signed with AI executives is “a good start”, but that the industry will need more. He said it in the second of two interviews with Vanity Fair, recorded in San Francisco on 2 October.
The magazine published both interviews on 5 October. Guiducci recorded the first interview on 11 September. Vanity Fair said on air that its parent company, Condé Nast, has a content deal with OpenAI.
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