Regulation and ethics · 2026-10-03
Sam Altman: Attributing religiosity to AI models is a safety problem
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes that claims that chatbots have religious traits or a spiritual essence are a safety issue.
What Sam Altman said
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the company that created ChatGPT, called attributing religiosity to AI models a “safety problem.” This is reported by Axios.
The issue concerns situations where people start to see a chatbot as something sacred, as a being with its own faith, or as a source of spiritual truths. For developers, such perceptions can be dangerous, because users begin to trust AI answers more than is warranted.
Why this matters to ordinary people
A chatbot answers confidently and in a human-like way, so it is easy to forget that it is a program that predicts words based on a huge body of text. It has no conscience, faith, or beliefs of its own, even if it sounds as though it does.
When a person believes that AI “knows more than anyone” or “speaks on behalf of higher powers,” they may take a mistaken or manipulative answer for the truth. That is why the safety issue concerns not only technology but also the psychology of users.
The advice is simple: treat AI answers as advice from an assistant, not as an authority, and check important things in reliable sources.
Sources: 🔗 Google News