Terms & Conditions: By Existing, You Accept Hacks, Scams and Other Bad Things

# Terms & Conditions: By Existing, You Accept Hacks, Scams and Other Bad Things

The fine print of the future just got longer.

On October 4, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat down with Politico's new technology newsletter Decoded and said the quiet part out loud: "We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency." Pressed on specifics, he added that he wouldn't take a trade of "no major hacks, there's no misuse of this technology, there's zero scams, there's zero all the other bad things that will happen" — because, in his words, people will do "orders of magnitude more" good stuff than bad stuff.

Read that back slowly. One of the handful of people building the most powerful technology on Earth has decided the hacks, the scams, and the misuse are just the service charge. Somebody's grandma is getting scammed by an AI-cloned voice, and it's filed under acceptable losses. Management apologizes for the inconvenience, in advance, forever.

Altman was drawing a line between OpenAI and its rival Anthropic, whose CEO Dario Amodei recently called on the industry to slow down and "pace the frontier." Altman said he actually agreed with that specific call — while insisting there was "a lot of daylight" between the two companies' philosophies. OpenAI favors what it calls a lighter-touch regulatory approach: broad access for everyone, damage be damned.

The remarkable thing is who objected. Usually Washington can't agree on the time of day, but Altman's comment united the parties in record time. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis questioned whether "a handful of tech oligarchs" should be making that decision for the rest of us. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said Altman shouldn't be deciding what bad things the public has to accept. Senator Elizabeth Warren called the statement "absurd" and said it's time to enforce existing laws and regulate AI.

Think about the confidence required. The man whose company is building the thing gets to price the damage, and the people paying the bill are everyone else. It's the great tech-industry tradition: move fast, break things, and when someone points at the broken things, call it a trade-off you never agreed to.

Here at Factually Offensive, we checked the ledger. Reuters reported the remarks on October 4; Fast Company rounded up the bipartisan backlash on October 5. The quotes are real. The scams, sadly, are also real.

And so we present, in honor of the announcement, the updated terms and conditions of modern existence: by existing, you accept hacks, scams, and other bad things. — Management.

Evidence Locker: backup-altman-bad-things