‘–2% interest rates’: Sam Altman tells Nikhil Kamath AGI may pay all and rewrite world’s money system

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman envisions a future where interest rates could plunge to –2%, universal basic income becomes a reality, and AI-generated wealth is redistributed through sovereign wealth funds and experimental currencies.

In a candid exchange with Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath, Altman said artificial general intelligence (AGI) will rewrite the rules of capitalism, push society back toward family and community, and spark economic shifts unseen in modern history.

Altman, one of the most influential voices in AI, said he hopes a world of technological abundance will reverse a troubling social trend. “Family and community have been in retreat,” he said. “In a world where people have more abundance, more time, more resources, I hope we turn back to that.”

Kamath countered that wealth doesn’t always quell desire, noting that human wants are often driven by status competition. Altman agreed. “Human demand and desire seem limitless. We’ll find new things to want and compete over.”

The conversation turned to the risks of AI concentrating wealth in a single corporate giant. Kamath posed a hypothetical: what if one company controlled 50% of global GDP? Altman dismissed this as improbable, likening AI’s trajectory to the transistor — a breakthrough that became embedded across countless industries. Still, he said if such dominance did occur, “society would say, ‘We don’t think so,’ and act.”

Where he sees near certainty is in the growth of redistribution mechanisms. “As society gets richer, redistribution will increase,” Altman predicted. Possible models include sovereign wealth funds, universal basic income, and even redistributing AI computing power itself. He described his Worldcoin project as an “interesting experiment” to uniquely identify humans in a privacy-preserving way and create a new currency to ensure “humans remain special” in the AI economy.

Kamath then raised the possibility of AGI being inherently deflationary — making capital less valuable as scarcity disappears. Altman acknowledged the logic but warned of short-term anomalies: “Maybe capital becomes incredibly important because every piece of compute is so valuable.”

In one striking anecdote, Altman recalled asking a dinner companion if interest rates in this future should be –2% or 25%. “He laughed and said it’s ridiculous… then stopped and said, actually, I’m not sure.”

Altman foresees a “weird” transitional period — perhaps one where humanity borrows heavily to build civilization-scale projects like Dyson spheres — before settling into long-term deflation. But, he admitted, “it’s very hard to see more than a few years into the future.”