"It was clear that if we didn't do it, the world was gonna be mostly built on Chinese open source models," Altman said.

Despite the uproar, Altman said that revenue from OpenAI’s API had doubled in the first 48 hours after GPT-5’s release. He is clear that he does not wish for such earnings to stem from unhealthy user fixations, and disparaged the idea of companies capitalising on them by turning their models into “Japanese anime sex bots,” according to The Verge.