In San Francisco, the architects of artificial intelligence gathered to make a case as old as industry itself: that those who build a thing are best suited to govern it. Sam Altman and his peers acknowledged the fears surrounding AI are real and warranted, yet argued that market incentives and moral responsibility within their own companies offer a more reliable safeguard than government oversight. The debate surfaces a tension that has shadowed every transformative technology — between the urgency of innovation and the slower, harder work of accountability. How humanity answers that question