Inside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's fixation on death and the apocalypse

• Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, spends a lot of time thinking about risk, largely in relation to AI.
• An investor friend told Insider that Altman became even more fixated on delaying death when his father died in 2018.

Sam Altman, the 38-year-old cofounder and CEO of the artificial-intelligence research company OpenAI, is on his way to becoming one of the most powerful people in the world.

But like many of Silicon Valley's biggest names, he remains preoccupied with the existential threats that could wipe out humanity — including one of his own creation.

Since OpenAI's 2022 release of ChatGPT, dozens of other companies have been working to develop AI systems that might surpass the intellectual capabilities of humans. The AI world has whipped itself into a frenzy debating whether this will usher in the next industrial revolution or the apocalypse. "I do worry, of course," Altman told Insider. "I mean, I worry about it a lot."

Worrying is not new for Altman. In a 2016 New Yorker interview, his mother said he's prone to what she called "cyberchondria," referring to his obsession with researching his maladies on the internet. One investor friend told Insider that Altman "says we vastly underestimate risk in society."

The known doomsday prepper was well prepared for disaster. Also in 2016, he told The New Yorker that he kept a stash of "guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to" in the case of a lethal synthetic virus or nuclear war. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, Altman said, he spent the first few weeks of lockdown in a state of isolation. He holed up at home, cutting off "any out-of-household contact" and even disinfecting his vegetables.

"My partner complained one night that the food I made smelled like a swimming pool," Altman told Insider in an email, "and that's when I realized things had gone too far."

Still, Altman remains fixated on delaying death. The investor friend told Insider that urgency grew when Altman's father, a real-estate developer, died in 2018. "I don't think anyone can lose your dad young and wish he didn't have more time with him," Altman told Insider.

Altman has used his wealth to fund tech startups dedicated to extending the human lifespan, including a $180 million investment in Retro Biosciences, which is studying the effects of cellular reprogramming, autophagy, and plasma-inspired therapeutics on human life expectancy. He's also secured himself a spot on the waiting list for Nectome, a company that promises to upload his brain to the cloud so it might one day be revived in a simulation. Still, Altman called the idea that he wanted to live forever a "caricature."

His goal, he says, is not to attain immortality but "to give people another 10 years of healthy, vigorous life."

Read Insider's full feature on Altman here: He's played chess with Peter Thiel, sparred with Elon Musk, and once, supposedly, stopped a plane crash: Inside Sam Altman's world, where truth is stranger than fiction