Sam Altman Warns Against Ascribing "Religious Force" to AI Models, Calls It a "Real Safety Issue"

On October 3, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that he is "very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models," calling it a "real safety issue." Altman did not mention anyone specifically in the post.
His comments followed a late-September New York Times report that Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah had been meeting with religious and philosophical scholars to discuss model welfare and whether AI systems like Claude could one day be conscious. Altman 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, Altman also warned the United Nations about "losing control of the future to AI," according to IPI Global Observatory.
OpenAI's safety leader David Robinson resigned earlier this month and publicly criticized its risk practices on the way out.