Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.

Start free trial →
SA Sam Altman Sam Altman Entrepreneur and investor who has served as CEO of OpenAI since 2019, leading the company behind ChatGPT and its research on artificial general intelligence.

“This is a thing you buy and you should be able to take it with you anywhere, and you should be able to go use all of the wonderful things these people are building. I have been disappointed to see other companies with subscriptions go in the other direction.”

TBPN · Startups & Venture · September 2026

“This is a thing you buy and you should be able to take it with you anywhere, and you should be able to go use all of the wonderful things these people are building. I have been disappointed to see other companies with subscriptions go in the other direction.” — Sam Altman, TBPN

Context

Asked about logging in with ChatGPT and bringing your compute with you across the internet, Altman says a ChatGPT subscription should work in any harness or service. He contrasts that with other companies that have restricted their subscriptions, without naming them.

Transcript

TBPN Around 14:09 into the episode
Sam Altman

I think it's so important to build an open ecosystem here and we want people to take well, to bring whatever they want into ChatGPT, run other apps there, but also to take their subscription and go use it elsewhere.

Jordi Hays

Mhmm.

Sam Altman

And any harness you want, any service you want, like this is I have been disappointed to see other companies with subscriptions go in the other direction. Like, this is a thing you buy and you should be able to take it with you anywhere and you should be able to go use all of the wonderful things these people are building. And I think we're gonna push that much further.

Jordi Hays

How do you think about the potential transition from OpenAI's products being very poll focused as as I mean, like, the app is there. Unless I come to it with a question with a prompt, it doesn't do anything to a world where my dot might message me. And then you get into how much is it messaging me…

Sam Altman

It it Yeah. I mean, there's clearly ways that people could misuse or growth hack the fact that AIs can, you know, ping you a lot. Yeah. I'm sure we'll see some companies get that wrong. We're gonna try very hard to not do that. But I my own experience over the last few weeks is I actually want…

John Coogan

Yeah. I'll often open ChatGPT and realize there's a very important email that I need to respond to. It somehow got mixed up and then you're like, you kind wish it pinged you.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from TBPN