OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has defended the resource-intensive use of AI by comparing it to all the energy—and food—that humans require, sparking a wave of backlash across social media.
That comparison, experts in climate and tech spaces say, is misguided, downplays the climate risks associated with AI, and illustrates the disconnect between tech CEOs and the rest of society.
Altman’s comments came while speaking to the Indian Express at the India AI Impact summit. The outlet asked him to address some of the common criticisms of AI, including the amount of energy and water the technology requires.
“One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query,” Altman says.
“But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” he continues. “It takes like 20 years of life, and all of the food you eat during that time, before you get smart. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people who have ever lived.”
When considering the energy needed to “train a human,” Altman claims in the interview that AI has “probably” already caught up to humans in terms of energy efficiency.
Misguided comparison
But the tech CEO’s blunt comparison is “misguided,” says Sasha Luccioni, climate lead of the AI platform Hugging Face.
“On a fundamental level, humans and AI models don’t use energy and natural resources in the same manner, and comparing the two makes no sense,” she says in an email to Fast Company.
AI models are trained on human data, Luccioni points out, so if comparing the two, “you should also take into account the time and resources that went into writing the books and creating the data used to train AI models.”
To Luccioni, Altman’s comments illustrate a “fundamental disconnect” between Big Tech leaders and broader society.
“These billionaires have built their fortunes on exploiting human knowledge and the earth’s natural resources, and continue taking both for granted while getting richer by the day,” she adds.
Fast Company reached out to OpenAI for comment.
AI’s water and energy use
Altman’s comparison has drawn particular ire from those in the climate space, including Michael Mann, a climatologist and coauthor, with scientist Peter Hotez, of the 2025 book Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World.
Indeed, the CEO’s statements tie into the very themes of the book. According to Mann, the book argues that forces like “plutocrats, pros, petrostates, phonies, and the press” promote anti-science rhetoric, which then hampers humanity’s ability to tackle everything from pandemics to the climate crisis.
Exact calculations about AI’s water and energy use vary, but many experts have raised alarms about its enormous power and resource needs.
A 2026 report from Global Water Intelligence projects that “water demand from the AI-driven New Economy will surge 129% by 2050,” putting even more pressure on strained utility systems alongside climate threats.
The International Energy Agency has likewise projected that total data center consumption, driven by AI, will double by 2030.
Though Altman dismissed concerns over AI’s water use, he did say that energy consumption is a concern, and that because the “world is using so much AI . . . we need to move toward nuclear or wind and solar very quickly.”
So far, the AI boom has led to an increase in natural gas power plants, even though it’s cheaper to build and run new clean energy projects.
Longtermism and techno-utopianism
According to Mann, Altman’s comments reek of controversial and potentially dangerous viewpoints that he says are common among tech executives, like longtermism and techno-utopianism.
Longtermism promotes the idea that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral imperative; it’s a belief that has been linked to the “effective altruism” movement.
Looking long-term would suggest caring about climate change, because the effects of sustained fossil fuel emissions will have disastrous impacts on humans for years to come.
But “longtermists” don’t tend to regard climate change as an “existential risk.” Instead, they focus on threats that they say technology can solve.
Techno utopianism, similarly, is a belief that technological advances are the way to achieve a “perfect” future society.
As Mann sees it, Altman along with other tech CEOs promote an idea that society should focus on the benefits of AI and other technologies while “implicitly downplaying the risks and threats posed in the immediate term, including the climate crisis.”
“There is, as I would remind Altman and his ilk, no economy on a dead planet,” Mann adds.