AGI for all among OpenAI’s ambitions for its next phase

Giving every person on Earth access to a personal artificial general intelligence (AGI) system and building AI researchers that can help advance science are among OpenAI's key goals for the future, according to a blog post by chief executive officerSam Altman and chief scientist Jakub Pachocki.

The company said it is entering a new phase focussed on making advanced AI abundant, affordable, and widely accessible, while ensuring that the technology remains safe and beneficial to society.

The company stressed that its "first commitment is to build AI in service of humanity" — the very principle that Altman's rival, Elon Musk, had accused OpenAI of abandoning in a lawsuit that ultimately did not go his way.


AI's 'electricity moment'

To explain its vision, OpenAI compared AI's rise to the spread of electricity in the early 20th century. While electricity initially solved practical problems, its real impact came from the opportunities it created as access expanded, enabling advances in industry, healthcare, communication, and living standards.

“This is happening again with AI,” Altman said in the blog post. “AI will soon be capable of extraordinary things. But the point is not the technology by itself. The point is what people can do with it.”

According to OpenAI, AI could help people learn new skills, navigate complex financial and legal decisions, start businesses, care for family members and contribute to scientific discoveries.

OpenAI added that it wants to empower people broadly rather than see power concentrated among a small number of companies, governments or individuals, echoing what Pope Leo XIV said in his first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas.

Humans remain central

While OpenAI is optimistic about AI's potential, it stressed that increasingly capable systems must remain safe, aligned with human intentions, and subject to human control.

“Entirely automating everything is not the future we want,” the company said. “AI should help people pursue their goals, not become untethered from them.”

The blog argued that human judgment will become more important as AI systems grow more capable. People will still be responsible for setting goals, making trade-offs, and deciding what is worth pursuing.

“A key long-term role for people will be deciding what is worth doing,” OpenAI said.

AI helping build AI

One of the strongest points in the blog was OpenAI's belief that AI systems will soon play a major role in research itself.

The company said AI-assisted research could become the biggest driver of technological progress within the next few years.

To support this vision, OpenAI is working towards creating an automated AI researcher. “Our internal belief is that by March of 2028 we may have a significant fraction of our research being done by AI systems in tandem with our own researchers,” the blog said.

This is a system capable of accelerating and increasingly automating research while remaining steerable and accountable.

The next chapter

The blog outlines three goals for OpenAI's next phase.

The first is building automated AI researchers that can accelerate scientific discovery and AI development.

The second is accelerating economic growth by boosting productivity, innovation and scientific progress, while ensuring the benefits are widely shared.

The third is providing every person on Earth with a personal AGI system that can help them achieve their goals.

OpenAI said these ambitions mark the beginning of its third chapter.

The first phase focussed on researching AGI, while the second centred on turning that research into products used by millions of people. The latest phase is about ensuring advanced AI becomes widely available and useful across society.

Anthropic calls for a slowdown

OpenAI's disclosure of plans to build automated AI researchers comes as rival AI firm Anthropic last week argued that the world should retain the ability to slow down or temporarily pause frontier AI development if advanced systems begin improving themselves too quickly.

In a blog post titled When AI Builds Itself, the company warned that self-improving AI could reduce human oversight and make safety problems harder to identify and fix.

Anthropic said any slowdown would need to be globally coordinated and verifiable, and plans to hold discussions with policymakers, researchers, civil society groups, and other AI companies. The debate comes just as both OpenAI and Anthropic filed draft papers for IPOs in the US.