OpenAI CEO Sam Altman visited London this week, part of a tour to ~17 cities, including Paris, Warsaw, and Lagos, to discuss AI, balanced regulation, and more
Altman’s London stop was part of an international effort to place OpenAI in direct conversation with governments and publics as AI rules were taking shape. That outreach sat alongside meetings with more than 100 US members of Congress and later reporting that OpenAI sought changes to the EU AI Act’s treatment of general-purpose AI (its EU AI Act lobbying effort).
London was not merely a tour stop: OpenAI subsequently chose it for its first office outside the US, tying regulatory engagement to a longer-term presence in a key European AI market.
First-order effects
OpenAI gains direct access to policymakers, developers, and prospective partners across London and other tour cities, while presenting its preferred framing of “balanced” AI regulation.
Officials and local AI communities receive a high-profile channel to question OpenAI’s leadership and signal their regulatory priorities directly.
Second-order effects
Other frontier-model developers face pressure to build comparable government-relations and local-market engagement, rather than leaving AI-policy debates to regulators and incumbents.
Policy discussions may increasingly incorporate technical and commercial input from model providers, raising the stakes for civil-society and competitor participation in rulemaking.
Third-order effects
If this engagement becomes standard practice, major AI labs will be judged not only as technology suppliers but as political counterparts that must maintain legitimacy across jurisdictions.
The pattern points toward AI governance being shaped through sustained negotiation between states and a concentrated group of frontier labs, with the eventual balance of influence still contested.
The trend: Frontier AI companies are evolving into state-facing institutions, pairing global market expansion with direct efforts to shape the regulatory environment in which their models operate.
Sam Altman just asked students at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) who thinks that OpenAI should start open sourcing models like GPT-5 on day one. Lots of hands were raised, and @sama responded “woah, we're definitely not gonna do that, but that's interesting to know” [im…
Well, obviously. Everyone wants open source base models except a few folks in Silicon Valley, a handful of AI doomers, and whoever they manage to scare in governments, https://twitter.com/...
Developing talents and technologies in France, acting for regulation at the French, European and global levels, these are our priorities in terms of artificial intelligence. We discussed this with Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT. [image]
Done safely and securely, AI has the potential to be transformational and grow the economy. This evening I met with @sama, @demishassabis and @AnthropicAI's Dario Amodei to discuss how the UK can provide international leadership on AI. [image]
had a great first week of the openai world tour in toronto, DC, rio, lagos, and lisbon. fun to see what people are building and get (lots of) feature requests, and even fun to talk to policymakers! madrid, warsaw, paris, london, and munich this week. [image]
Spent the afternoon in a sweaty @ucl lecture hall listening to Sam Altman's v. positive take on the future that awaits us if we get AI right. My piece for POLITICO here: https://pro.politico.eu/...
Something I heard Sam Altman say in Lagos was that they built ChatGPT to let people see how far AI technology had come. Been thinking of the alternative scenario where they don't build a conversational interface and Ai tech just starts popping up everywhere...
One thing that stood out to me during the Q&A with Sam Altman in Lagos was his statement that Nigeria is the biggest adopter of OpenAI products on the continent. Makes me wonder how many ChatGPT (and DALL-E?) users we have in the country, and what the most common use cases are.
Some folks over in London were protesting OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at an event... so I thought it only appropriate to use an AI tool to turn them into clowns. [video]
Sam Altman kindly took the time to talk to us, and this reinforced my image of him: a man who is friendly, passionate and genuinely believes he is on a mission to save humanity. [image]
“He said he wanted to see “something between the traditional European approach and the traditional US approach.” That is, a bit of regulation but not too much” https://www.theverge.com/...
Report on Sam Altman's visit to @UCL where he was interviewed by @azeem. Sam was met with protestors concerned with the risks of AGI and he spoke with them. https://www.theverge.com/...
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is on a mini world tour, talking up the benefits of AI and the need for regulation (but not too much). He spoke in London today, while protestors called for pause on the development of hypothetical AGI systems. Here's my report: https://www.theverge.com/... …
Sam Altman: “I think we have lost our collective sense of optimism about the future... I think all of us should act as our duty to bring that back... The only way that I know to return to that sense of optimism...is to use technology to create abundance.” [video]