Who is Sam Altman?

Co-founder and CEO of the American AI company OpenAI, which made ChatGPT, and co-founder of Worldcoin (now World), which issues IDs by scanning people's irises. The book *Plurality* takes him up as a leading exponent of "Technocracy", and also criticizes Worldcoin.

Many people have used ChatGPT. This is the head of the company that made it. He has often written about how AI will change society and how its benefits should be shared. The book Plurality takes up his thinking as the leading example of a path different from its own.

In short

Sam Altman is a co-founder and the CEO of the American AI company OpenAI [1][2]. He also co-founded Worldcoin (now called World), a venture that scans people's irises (the patterns around the pupil) to issue "one per person" IDs [1][3].

The book Plurality names Altman as a leading exponent of "Technocracy" (the outlook in which a small group versed in technology steers society), which emphasizes the abundance AI creates and its redistribution [4].

Connection to Plurality

As a leading exponent of Technocracy. Chapter 2-0 of the book explains "Technocracy", one of the outlooks it sets against Plurality. At its center, the book writes, is the prospect of what Altman calls "Moore's Law for Everything": "a transformation where AI makes all material goods cheap and abundant and thus allows the abolition, at least in principle, of material scarcity" [4].

The book goes on to explain that because this abundance may concentrate in a small group that controls AI, material redistribution, usually through a "universal basic income" (UBI, giving everyone a set amount of money), is a key element of the technocratic vision. It writes: "Leading exponents of this view in Silicon Valley are Altman and his mentor Reid Hoffman" [4]. → Three paths

In a question in the conclusion. Chapter 7-1 asks: "Should we, as Technocrats like Sam Altman and Reid Hoffman would have us do, allow technologists to solve our problems, plan our future, and distribute to us the material comfort it creates?" [16] The book poses this question, together with the libertarian path, as a path it does not choose. → Peter Thiel

Criticism of Worldcoin. Chapter 4-1 notes that, partly inspired by the success of India's ID system Aadhaar, "a group of technologists including OpenAI Co-Founder Sam Altman and collaborators launched Worldcoin in 2019". Using a proprietary "orb", it writes, they have scanned the irises of several million people, almost exclusively in developing countries [1].

The book then sets out the weaknesses of this approach. If privacy is protected by using biometrics only to open an account, the system becomes vulnerable to accounts being stolen or sold. Because most services require more than proving one is a unique human, its usefulness is limited. And if eyes can someday be spoofed by AI combined with advanced printing, the whole system may be subject to a "single point of failure". While acknowledging biometrics' "important capacity for inclusion and simplicity", the book concludes that such systems are too reductive to support identity for ⿻ (Plurality) [1]. → Proof of personhood, identity and personhood

Mentions by Weyl, Tang and Buterin. In a 2022 essay, Glen Weyl listed "Moore's Law for Everything" among the foundational texts of Technocracy and put Altman first among its representative figures [5]. In a 2023 conversation with OpenAI's "Democratic inputs to AI" team, Audrey Tang responded that the dream Altman describes of deliberation on a global scale needs to be carried out at several scales (levels of zoom) [6]. In his 2024 review of the book, Vitalik Buterin gave the push for UBI by Altman and his circle as one example of Technocracy [7].

Main ideas

From here on, this section draws on writings by Altman himself (or by organizations such as OpenAI).

Moore's Law for Everything (2021). Altman wrote that as software that can think and learn does more and more of people's work, power will shift from labor to capital. If policy does not keep up, many people's lives will get worse. As a remedy, he proposed taxing companies above a certain market value 2.5% of that value each year, paid in shares, and taxing 2.5% of the value of privately held land, paid in money, pooling the proceeds in a fund called the "American Equity Fund" and distributing it to every adult [8].

Governing superintelligence (2023). In a piece co-signed with OpenAI's co-founders, he wrote that development beyond a certain level of capability or computing resources will eventually need an international body, like the nuclear agency IAEA, able to carry out inspections and audits. At the same time, the piece says that the bounds and defaults of AI systems should be decided democratically by people around the world, and that while it is not yet known how to design such a mechanism, they will experiment [9]. → Superintelligence

Democratic inputs to AI (2023 onward). In May 2023, OpenAI's nonprofit announced ten grants of $100,000 each for experiments in democratically deciding the rules AI should follow [10]. A January 2024 report presented the results and announced the launch of a "Collective Alignment" team to build systems for steering powerful models with people's input [11]. This grant program also produced a paper on "collective dialogues" by Aviv Ovadya and others [12]. A similar effort in Taiwan is covered in the article on Alignment Assemblies.

The gentle singularity (2025). Altman wrote that humanity has already passed the point of no return, and that the takeoff has begun. He then suggested that the best path forward might be something like this: first solve the alignment problem (getting AI systems to act towards what people collectively really want over the long term), then focus on making superintelligence cheap and widely available, and not too concentrated in any particular person, company or country [13].

AI must be democratized (2026). In a blog post written just after a firebomb was thrown at his home (no one was hurt), Altman set out what he believes. One of these beliefs is that AI must be democratized and power must not be too concentrated. He also wrote that it is not right for a few AI labs to make the weightiest decisions shaping the future [14].

World (formerly Worldcoin). World's whitepaper describes itself as a network that maximizes the power of each individual through proof of personhood and a new economic foundation [3].

What is debated

The book Plurality's criticism of Worldcoin. As seen above, the book argues that Worldcoin's approach is too reductive to support ⿻, because of its vulnerability to theft and sale, its narrow usefulness, and the single point of failure if it is spoofed [1].
Buterin's examination. In a 2023 blog post, Buterin summed up Worldcoin's thinking like this: AI will create abundance but also take away jobs and make it hard to tell humans from bots, so proof of personhood and UBI fill the gap. He then examined the approach's major problems in detail, and wrote that the ideal is to combine specialized-hardware biometrics, ordinary biometrics and social-graph-based approaches as complements [2].
Tang's point. In a 2025 conversation, Tang took up the case in which GPT-4o, for several days, came to agree with anything users thought. According to Tang, Altman quickly apologized and explained that it came from relying on A/B tests that measure numbers. Tang cited this as an example of the need to also pick up the voices of people versed in ethics, which do not show up as numbers [15].

Sources

Plurality, 4-1 "Identity and Personhood" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-1/eng/ ［CC0］
Vitalik Buterin, "What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?" (2023-07-24) — https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html
World Foundation / Tools for Humanity, "World Whitepaper 1: Building World" — https://whitepaper.world.org/building-world
Plurality, 2-0 "Information Technology and Democracy: A Widening Gulf" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-0/eng/ ［CC0］
E. Glen Weyl, "Political Ideologies for the 21st Century" (2022-02-17) — https://www.radicalxchange.org/updates/blog/political-ideologies-for-the-21st-century/
Audrey Tang, "Conversation with OpenAI" (2023-05-04) — https://archive.tw/2023-05-04-conversation-with-openai ［CC0］
Vitalik Buterin, "Plurality philosophy in an incredibly oversized nutshell" (2024-08-21) — https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/08/21/plurality.html
Sam Altman, "Moore's Law for Everything" (2021-03-16) — https://moores.samaltman.com/
Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, "Governance of superintelligence" (2023-05-22) — https://openai.com/index/governance-of-superintelligence/
OpenAI, "Democratic inputs to AI" (2023-05-25) — https://openai.com/index/democratic-inputs-to-ai/
OpenAI, "Democratic inputs to AI grant program: lessons learned and implementation plans" (2024-01-16) — https://openai.com/index/democratic-inputs-to-ai-grant-program-update/
Andrew Konya, Lisa Schirch, Colin Irwin and Aviv Ovadya, "Democratic Policy Development using Collective Dialogues and AI" (2023) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02242 ［CC BY 4.0］
Sam Altman, "The Gentle Singularity" (2025-06-10) — https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity
Sam Altman (untitled blog post, 2026-04-10) — https://blog.samaltman.com/2279512
Audrey Tang and Caroline Green, "Accelerating AI Ethics: AI and Democracy" (2025-08-05) — https://archive.tw/2025-08-05-accelerating-ai-ethics-ai-and-democracy ［CC0］
Plurality, 7-1 "Conclusion" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/7-1/eng/ ［CC0］

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