OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared his view of the promise and peril of advanced artificial intelligence at a Federal Reserve conference in Washington, D.C. on July 22, 2025. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

For as much promise as artificial intelligence shows in making life better, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is worried.

The tech leader who has done so much to develop AI and make it accessible to the public says the technology could have life-altering effects on nearly everything, particularly if deployed by the wrong hands.

There’s a possible world in which foreign adversaries could use AI to design a bio weapon to take down the power grid, or break into financial institutions and steal wealth from Americans, he said. It’s hard to imagine without superhuman intelligence, but it becomes “very possible,” with it, he said.

“Because we don’t have that, we can’t defend against it,” Altman said at a Federal Reserve conference this week in Washington, D.C. “We continue to like, flash the warning lights on this. I think the world is not taking us seriously. I don’t know what else we can do there, but it’s like, this is a very big thing coming.”

Altman joined the conference Tuesday to speak about AI’s role in the financial sector, but also spoke about how it is changing the workforce and innovation. The growth of AI in the last five years has surprised even him, Altman said.

He acknowledged real fear that the technology has potential to grow beyond the capabilities that humans prompt it for, but said the time and productivity savings have been undeniable. 

OpenAI’s most well-known product, ChatGPT, was released to the public in November 2022, and its current model, GPT-4o, has evolved. Last week, the company had a model that achieved “gold-level performance,” akin to operating as well as humans that are true experts in their field, Altman said.

Many have likened the introduction of AI to the invention of the internet, changing so much of our day-to-day lives and workplaces. But Altman instead compared it to the transistor, a foundational piece of hardware invented in the 1940s that allowed electricity to flow through devices.

“It changed what we were able to build. It became part of, kind of, everything pretty quickly,” Altman said. “And in the same way, I don’t think you’ll be talking about AI companies for very long, you will just expect products and services to use this technology.”

When prompted by the Federal Reserve’s Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman to predict how AI will continue to evolve the workforce, Altman said he couldn’t make specific predictions.

“There are cases where entire classes of jobs will go away,” Altman said. “There are entirely new classes of jobs that will come and largely, I think this will look somewhat like most of history, and that the tools people have to use their jobs will let them do more, achieve things in new ways.” 

One of the unexpected upsides to the rollout of GPT has been how much it is used by small businesses, Altman said. He shared a story of an Uber driver who told him he was using ChatGPT for legal consultations, customer support, marketing decisions and more.

“It was not like he was taking jobs from other people. His business just would have failed,” Altman said. “He couldn’t pay for the lawyers. He couldn’t pay for the customer support people.”

Altman said he was surprised that the financial industry was one of the first to begin integrating GPT models into their work because it is highly regulated, but some of their earliest enterprise partners have been financial institutions like Morgan Stanley. The company is now increasingly working with the government, which has its own standards and procurement process for AI, to roll out OpenAI services to its employees.

Altman acknowledged the risks AI poses in these regulated institutions, and with the models themselves. Financial services are facing a fraud problem, and AI is only making it worse — it’s easier than ever to fake voice or likeness authentication, Altman said.

AI decisionmaking in financial and other industries presents data privacy concerns and potential for discrimination. Altman said GPT’s model is “steerable,” in that you can tell it to not consider factors like race or sex in making a decision, and that much of the bias in AI comes from the humans themselves.

“I think AIs are dispassionate and unemotional,” Altman said. “And I think it’ll be possible for AI — correctly built — to be a significant de-biasing force in many industries, and I think that’s not what many people thought, including myself, with the way we used to do AI.”

As much as Altman touted GPT and other AI models’ ability to increase productivity and save humans time, he also spoke about his concerns.

He said that though it’s been greatly improved in more recent models, AI hallucinations, or models that produce inaccurate or made-up outputs, are possible. He also spoke of a newer concept called prompt injections, the idea that a model that has learned personal information can be tricked into telling a user something they shouldn’t know.

In addition to the threat of foreign adversaries using AI for harm, Altman said he has two other major concerns for the evolution of AI. It feels very unlikely, he said, but “loss of control,” or the idea that AI overpowers humans, is possible.

What concerns him the most is the idea that models could get so integrated into society and get so smart that humans become reliant on them without realizing.

“And even without a drop of malevolence from anyone, society can just veer in a sort of strange direction,” he said.

There are mild cases of this happening, Altman said, like young people overrelying on ChatGPT make emotional, life-altering decisions for them.

“We’re studying that. We’re trying to understand what to do about it,” Altman said. “Even if ChatGPT gives great advice, even if chatGPT gives way better advice than any human therapist, something about kind of collectively deciding we’re going to live our lives the way that the AI tells us feels bad and dangerous.” 

A 2024 provision under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) protects reproductive health information from disclosure to law enforcement when care was legally obtained, such as in another state with abortion access. (Photo by Dave Whitney/Getty Images)

Two pending lawsuits over a 2024 federal rule protecting certain reproductive health information from disclosure are on hold while the Trump administration decides whether to appeal a Texas judge’s June decision that declared the rule unlawful and void.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk issued an opinion nullifying the federal rule that shielded reproductive health information from law enforcement when care was legally obtained, such as in another state with abortion access. In this case, Dr. Carmen Purl argued that the U.S. Health and Human Services rule conflicted with the laws requiring her to report child abuse. Purl said in court documents she believes abortion and gender-affirming care fall under the definitions of child abuse.

Purl lives in the judicial district where Kacsmaryk — who has taken anti-abortion stances in the past — is the only judge. His ruling applied nationwide and took effect immediately.

Without the rule, law enforcement officials in states with abortion bans may issue subpoenas for records related to reproductive health care obtained legally in another state, as some have already recently tried to do. According to health policy nonprofit KFF, 22 states and the District of Columbia have laws limiting what reproductive health information can be obtained, but others with legal abortion access do not, such as New Hampshire and Virginia.

Abortion-rights advocates say it’s largely an intimidation tactic meant to sow fear in patients and providers. Since the Dobbs decision in 2022,  anti-abortion attorney Jonathan Mitchell filed nine petitions in Texas seeking to legally question abortion funds, providers and researchers, and two individual women who sought abortions in other states, according to the Texas Tribune.

Carmel Shachar, a Harvard law professor who has extensively researched data privacy and health policy, said it’s possible for a patient to travel to a state with legal access and have that information stored in their medical records that is shared with their providers back home.

“Without the reproductive privacy rule, the concern will be, ‘OK, will some of these states that have taken a very strong stance against abortion be able to pinpoint where residents of their states travel to receive abortion care?’” Shachar said.

Tennessee plaintiffs push for separate ruling after Texas decision

Two lawsuits challenging the legality of the rule are frozen at least until the government’s Aug. 18 deadline to appeal. One case is in Missouri, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the other. Paxton’s office had also challenged the legality of the underlying privacy rule or HIPAA established in 2000, which could have opened more avenues for state investigations if a judge agreed to throw it out. But according to recent court filings, the state is no longer asking the court to do that.

A Tennessee lawsuit includes 17 other states that heavily restrict or ban abortion as plaintiffs. Their attorneys general asked the court to find the 2024 rule unlawful because they said it impedes their right to investigate cases of waste, fraud and abuse. In the most recent court brief, attorneys for Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said the case can still be decided by U.S. District Judge Katherine Crytzer, an appointee of Republican President Donald Trump.

Until judgment is affirmed on appeal and no further appellate review is available or the deadline to appeal passes, “the plaintiff states’ claims remain live and ready for this court to resolve,” the brief said.

Legal organization continues attempts to intervene so they can appeal

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) allows law enforcement to obtain health information for investigation purposes. But the addition of the 2024 provision under former Democratic President Joe Biden prohibited disclosure of protected health information in investigations against any person for the mere act of seeking, obtaining, or facilitating reproductive health care, to impose criminal or civil liabilities for that conduct, or to identify the person involved in seeking or obtaining that care. It also applied to gender-affirming care.

The U.S. Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment. Whether it appeals Kacsmaryk’s ruling is in question, as the Justice Department under Trump did not address whether it thought the 2024 rule was proper and lawful prior to Kacsmaryk’s decision. Attorneys instead said they were reviewing the rule but had no other updates. In the Missouri and Tennessee cases, DOJ attorneys have argued for dismissal for other legal reasons, but also have not defended the 2024 rule itself.

In March, the DOJ dropped the case that argued the federal law mandating stabilizing emergency care should apply to those who need emergency abortion care. And in early June, U.S. Health and Human Services rescinded guidance that said that care should be required in emergencies.

Attorneys for Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal organization, are representing Doctors for America and the cities of Columbus, Ohio, and Madison, Wisconsin, and attempted to intervene in the case because they did not expect the government to defend the rule. If they were allowed to intervene, they could appeal Kacsmaryk’s opinion striking down the rule regardless of the Trump administration’s decision.

Kacsmaryk denied their motion, while a decision in the other three cases is pending. Carrie Flaxman, senior legal adviser for Democracy Forward, said they have appealed that denial to a higher court. Given that the Department of Justice attorneys chose not to defend the rule on the merits in court proceedings, Flaxman said, she thinks they have a good argument for appeal.

Repealing the rule was a directive in Project 2025, the blueprint document for the next presidential administration published by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Several prominent anti-abortion organizations were part of the panel that drafted Project 2025, and many of the individuals involved in writing the 900-page document now work for the Trump administration.