Sam Altman reportedly pitched three endgames for AI safety, one involving a single firm melting everyone else's GPUs

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly laid out three approaches to safe AI for his employees.

The details come from a report by The Information, citing people familiar with the matter. Altman made the remarks internally last week, while the Trump administration is preparing what would be its first framework for overseeing developers of superintelligence.

From the International Atomic Energy Agency to the battle for compute

The first approach would create an organization modeled after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to enforce safety standards. OpenAI publicly called for such an institution back in May 2023. It would inspect systems, require audits, and monitor compute and energy use. A body like this would depend on international cooperation, especially with countries building frontier models, including China.

Altman called the second approach the "Demis Plan." It comes from a proposal Demis Hassabis, then head of Google's AI lab Deepmind, made about ten years ago. Hassabis envisioned an AI organization modeled after CERN. In Altman's version, the major labs would merge into a single entity or operate under its umbrella, and that entity would supply cooperating countries with models.

Altman reportedly called the third approach the "Eliezer Plan," after AI safety theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky. In this scenario, a developer accumulates so much economic power through self-improving AI that it withholds compute from everyone else and could, in the most extreme case, shut down everyone else's computing capabilities entirely. Altman brought up the scenario only for completeness, according to the report. One source said the remark was read as a jab at a competitor, given Yudkowsky's ties to Anthropic.

Safety matters, but not at the cost of falling behind

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