OpenAI Sam Altman warns of new safety risk: ‘AI becoming religious force’

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has sounded alarm over new safety risks emanating from artificial intelligence in his post.

According to Altman, the real safety issue comes from the practice of surrendering “religious authority” or human judgement to AI models.

Taking to X, the CEO of ChatGPT maker company wrote, “I am very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models, and think it is a real safety issue.”

His warning comes after the reports highlighting that Anthropic held private meetings with religious and philosophical thinkers over AI consciousness and morality.

As reported by the New York Times, Anthropic’s discussions with religious scholars focused on whether AI systems such as Claude could potentially be conscious and what role religious thinking could play in shaping the models’ behaviours.

When the Anthropic delegation reached the Vatican, Christopher Olah and his team reportedly pressed the papal council to take the possibility of artificial intelligence consciousness seriously.

When contacted for comment, Anthropic declined to share specifics regarding the discussion.

Besides exploring consciousness, Anthropic has reportedly been studying model welfare to understand how advanced AI systems could have experienced experiences that warrant moral considerations.

When it comes to AI consciousness, the top tech executive has pushed back against this idea. For instance, Microsoft CEO Mustafa Suleyman also warned against developing AI models that seem conscious as people will start believing that AI has subjective experiences and they could cause new risks.