Sam Altman has rejected claims about the environmental cost of ChatGPT, calling many of them exaggerated and detached from reality. Speaking to The Indian Express on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit 2026, he said viral posts about the chatbot’s water and power use had gone too far.
Assertions circulating online that ChatGPT consumes gallons of water for every query were, in his words, “completely untrue, totally insane,” and have “no connection to reality.” He made these remarks during an interview at the summit, which examined India’s artificial intelligence ambitions and the resources needed to support them.
Altman also addressed claims about electricity use. He was responding to a question from Anant Goenka, Executive Director of The Indian Express Group, who referred to a previous interview with Bill Gates and asked if it was accurate to say that a single ChatGPT query uses the equivalent of 1.5 iPhone battery charges. “There’s no way it’s anything close to that much,” Altman replied.
How Does He Compare AI Energy Use To Humans?
Altman said that public debate often puts the issue in a way that misleads people. He argued that many discussions concentrate on “how much energy it takes to train an AI model, relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query.”
He said that comparison leaves out the energy required to develop human intelligence in the first place. “But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. 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 that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you,” he said.
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In his view, the fairer test looks at what happens after the model has already been trained. “If you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question versus a human? And probably, AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis, measured that way.”
What About AGI?
The conversation also turned to the future of AI systems. Altman spoke about artificial general intelligence, often referred to as AGI, which describes a stage at which an AI system can perform every task that a human can, with greater precision, efficiency and speed.
He said that AGI feels “pretty close at this point.” He went further, adding, “Given what I know to be a faster takeoff, I expect [artificial] superintelligence is not that far off.” His comments suggest confidence that the technology is advancing at a pace that could soon match or surpass human capability across a full range of tasks.
These comments came at a time when governments and companies are discussing the benefits of AI against its environmental and social costs. Questions about electricity use, water consumption and data centre expansion have become more frequent the more that AI tools reach users.
Altman’s argument in this is around the idea that critics often measure the wrong thing. He contends that once the initial training phase is complete, answering an individual question may require less energy than many assume. He also rejects headline grabbing comparisons, such as the claim that each query drains 1.5 iPhone charges, saying that figure is nowhere near accurate.
