OpenAI CEO Sam Altman delivered a striking admission this week: even as artificial intelligence continues its rapid advance, he believes short-form video content poses a real threat to young minds — one severe enough that he would keep his own children away from it entirely.
Speaking on stage with Salesforce CEO and chairman Marc Benioff at the company’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Altman was candid about the dangers lurking in the endless-scroll era of social media. When asked what lessons AI companies should draw from social media’s damaging impact on young people, Altman didn’t hold back.
“I think we’re going to stay in an extremely human-centric world no matter how good the technology gets, and I think one of the things I didn’t like about social media is, I think, it pushed us a little bit more away,” Altman told Benioff.
The tech executive’s comments landed just weeks after Meta agreed to a massive roughly $17.1 billion multistate settlement on August 26, resolving accusations that the social media giant deliberately hooked teenagers on its platforms.
Altman made clear he doesn’t believe tech companies alone should bear the blame for society’s ills, but he admitted he would have run things differently had he been in charge of a major social media company.
“I happen to like short for video … but I wouldn’t let my kids near that stuff,” Altman said bluntly. “I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect kids to be able to resist that dopamine thing or know that they even should.”
He went further, warning that while short-form video isn’t inherently evil, it carries real risk. “I don’t think short-form video is inherently evil, but I do think it’s dangerous,” Altman said.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Turning to his own industry, Altman acknowledged that mistakes are inevitable as AI technology develops. “Some degree of accidents are unavoidable with new technology across the industry,” he said — but he insisted the sector can move forward responsibly by prioritizing safety over rapid capability gains, drawing a comparison to how the aviation industry learns from past incidents to prevent future ones.
Altman’s remarks came just days after he voiced agreement with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has called on the AI industry to pace the development of frontier technology rather than race ahead unchecked.
Meanwhile, regulators overseas appear to be taking the concerns over youth and social media seriously. The European Commission is reportedly preparing to roll out the EU Kids Act, a sweeping proposal that would impose age-based restrictions on children’s social media use — including barring kids from creating accounts until age 15, according to Politico.
Notably, OpenAI itself pulled the plug on its own short-form, TikTok-style app, Sora, back in April 2026 — just months after the AI-generated video platform first launched in September 2025.
[READ MORE: Michigan Democrat El-Sayed Distances Himself From Streamer Hasan Piker’s al-Qaeda Comparison]
