Sam Altman says parenthood cemented his skepticism toward algorithmic feeds and infinite scroll, even as he builds the most widely used AI tool in the world.
The man leading the company that put ChatGPT in hundreds of millions of hands wants his own child to stay far away from screens. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who welcomed a son in early 2025, recently told the "Mostly Human" podcast that watching older toddlers glued to iPads has made him firmly opposed to early device exposure. His position places him in a growing club of Silicon Valley leaders who build technology they deliberately keep away from their own families.
Altman described seeing children just slightly older than his own who become inconsolable when a tablet is taken away, and said that scene left a deep impression. He wants his son playing in the dirt, not scrolling through algorithmic feeds optimized to hold attention at any cost. While he acknowledged uncertainty about the right age to introduce artificial intelligence specifically, he said he plans to err on the later side rather than rushing in.
Altman is hardly alone in this instinct. As Business Insider reported, Google CEO Sundar Pichai kept a phone away from his son until age eleven. Bill Gates enforced a similar rule in his household, withholding smartphones until his children were fourteen. The late Steve Jobs famously told journalist Nick Bilton in 2010 that his kids had not used the iPad extensively, a comment that startled people who assumed the device's creator would have it embedded in his family's daily routine. The pattern has only sharpened over the past decade as concerns about youth mental health and screen addiction have moved from academic speculation into mainstream policy debates.
The irony running through all of this is hard to ignore. These executives have built platforms and devices designed to maximize engagement, capturing attention through algorithmic recommendations that serve content in a continuous, frictionless stream. Yet when it comes to their personal lives, many instinctively choose boundaries that mirror what pediatricians and child psychologists have been recommending for years. The American Academy of Pediatrics has long advised that children under two avoid screen time entirely and that older children have clearly defined limits, though their guidelines have gradually shifted to emphasize content quality and parental involvement over rigid cutoffs.
Where AI Fits Into the Picture
Altman's situation is somewhat different from that of his predecessors, because the technology he oversees is not purely a consumption medium. Young people already make up a substantial portion of ChatGPT's user base, relying on it as a study companion, a daily organizer, and sometimes a confidant for venting frustrations. This is not passive scrolling. It is interactive, conversational, and increasingly capable of mimicking genuine human dialogue. That distinction cuts both ways. Advocates argue that AI tutors can personalize education in ways classrooms never could, while critics worry about emotional dependency and the erosion of critical thinking when a machine always has an answer ready.
Altman himself sketched out an optimistic vision during the podcast: schools that dedicate a few hours each day to intensive, one-on-one AI tutoring followed by collaborative projects guided by human teachers. He called that model exciting, but immediately acknowledged the equally plausible scenario where the technology spirals in damaging directions. That tension between promise and risk is essentially the operating philosophy of OpenAI as a company, and it appears to be Altman's operating philosophy as a parent as well.
Meanwhile, Altman has been candid about using ChatGPT in his own parenting. On "The Tonight Show" with Jimmy Fallon in December, he admitted he could not imagine navigating a newborn without it. At one gathering, another parent mentioned their six-month-old was already crawling everywhere. Altman slipped away to a bathroom and asked ChatGPT whether his own son's lack of mobility at the same age was a concern. The model reassured him his child's development was within normal range, which he described as exactly the kind of quick, grounding answer a anxious new parent needs at midnight.
As for whether fatherhood has raised the stakes of his work on artificial general intelligence and existential safety, Altman was blunt. He said that preventing catastrophic outcomes from AI has always been his highest priority, and that he thought carefully about the world his future children would inherit long before his son was born. Whether that reassurance convinces regulators, competitors, and the broader public remains an open question, but it signals that Altman sees no contradiction between the gravity of his mission and the quiet conviction that his child should spend these early years far away from the technology his father builds every day.
