OpenAI’s Top Crisis Fixer Is Working To Pull AI Out Of Its Binary Doom Loop

Three months ago, OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman shared with me his growing alarm over a building public relations crisis across the AI industry: even as tools like ChatGPT exploded in popularity, an ever-larger segment of the public held a negative view of artificial intelligence. In the months since that conversation, that backlash has only intensified.

College commencement speakers now get booed for framing AI in optimistic terms. Last month, an attacker threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s San Francisco home, and left behind a manifesto calling for violence against AI executives. No company has more at stake in this reputation crisis than OpenAI.

Tasked with fixing this problem is Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief of global affairs and a veteran political operative. I sat down with him this week to discuss what I see as his two highest-stakes challenges yet: convincing the public to embrace OpenAI’s technology, while persuading policymakers to write regulations that don’t strangle the company’s growth. For Lehane, these goals are one and the same.

“When I was in the White House, we always used to talk about how good policy equals good politics,” Lehane says. “You have to think about both of these things moving in concert.”

After cutting his teeth handling crisis communications in Bill Clinton’s White House, Lehane gave himself the nickname “master of disaster.” He later helped Airbnb fight off regulators in cities that viewed short-term home rentals as existing in a legal gray area, or as he puts it, “ahead of the law.” Lehane also played an instrumental role in launching Fairshake, a powerful crypto industry super PAC that worked to legitimize digital currencies in Washington. Since joining OpenAI in 2024, he’s quickly become one of the company’s most influential executives, and now oversees its communications and policy teams.

Lehane tells me public narratives about how AI will reshape society are often “artificially binary.” On one side is the “Bob Ross view of the world” that predicts a future where nobody has to work anymore, and everyone lives in “beachside homes painting in watercolors all day.” On the other is a dystopian future where AI grows so powerful that only a small group of elites can control it. Neither scenario is particularly realistic, in Lehane’s view.

OpenAI itself contributed to this polarizing rhetoric in the past. CEO Sam Altman warned last year that “whole classes of jobs” will disappear when the technological singularity arrives. More recently he has softened his tone, declaring that “jobs doomerism is likely long-term wrong.”

Lehane wants OpenAI to start sharing a more “calibrated” message about AI’s promises that avoids both extremes. He says the company needs to put forward real solutions for the problems the public actually worries about, such as mass job displacement and the harm chatbots can cause children. As an example of this new approach, Lehane pointed to a set of policy proposals OpenAI recently published, which include backing a four-day work week, expanding access to health care, and passing a tax on AI-powered labor.

“If you’re going to go out and say that there are challenges here, you also then have an obligation—particularly if you’re building this stuff—to actually come up with the ideas to solve those things,” Lehane says.

Some former OpenAI employees, however, have accused the company of downplaying the most serious potential downsides of widespread AI adoption. WIRED previously reported that the entire team of OpenAI’s economic research unit quit after they grew concerned the group was being turned into an advocacy arm for the company. The former employees argued that their warnings about AI’s economic impacts were inconvenient for OpenAI, but honestly reflected what the company’s own research found.

Packing Political Punches

As public skepticism of AI grows, politicians are under pressure to prove to voters they can rein in big tech companies. In response, the AI industry has launched a new set of super PACs that boost pro-AI political candidates and work to shift public opinion of the technology. Critics say the move has already backfired, and some candidates now campaign on the fact that AI super PACs are opposing them.

Lehane helped set up one of the largest pro-AI super PACs, Leading the Future, which launched last summer with more than $100 million in funding commitments from tech industry figures, including Brockman. The group has opposed Alex Bores, the author of New York’s strongest AI safety law who is running for Congress in the state’s 12th district.

Brockman previously told WIRED that he and his wife’s personal political donations to Leading the Future, as well as to former President Donald Trump’s Super PAC, were aligned with OpenAI’s mission to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity. While he made the donations in a personal capacity, he said he believed the funding could help put pro-AI candidates in office who share that core goal.

Lehane tells me he consulted Brockman on his recent political spending, but only in “a very general way.” At another point in our conversation, he noted that Brockman was “really looking to prioritize good AI policy.”

Lehane says he’s currently “not involved” in the day-to-day operations or decisionmaking at Leading the Future, and hasn’t shared feedback with the group about its work since it launched. He has instead tried to “let them be their own independent outside thing.” He adds that OpenAI has repeatedly tried to clarify, including in internal blog posts directed at employees, that it does not directly fund any super PACs.

Policy Battles Across State Capitals

Lehane compares OpenAI to the companies that built earlier foundational public utilities like railroads and electricity. While OpenAI has yet to prove its products are as critical as those technologies, it’s already moving ahead to work hand in hand with the U.S. government.

In the absence of any meaningful federal AI legislation, OpenAI is pursuing what Lehane calls “reverse federalism”—lobbying states to pass AI laws that are largely identical to one another. The goal is to “harmonize” new bills with existing legislation on the books in California and New York, and prevent lawmakers from creating a patchwork of conflicting rules across the country that Lehane argues would derail innovation.

In practice, OpenAI has also advocated for policies that give even more leeway to the AI industry. The company recently supported a bill in Illinois that would, among other things, let AI labs dodge liability if their models caused catastrophic harm, as long as the companies published safety frameworks on a public website. Tech industry groups have lobbied for AI liability shields for years, arguing that only bad actors—not model developers—should be on the hook if their products are used to commit crimes.

When the Illinois bill first began attracting attention, its sponsor called it “an initiative of OpenAI.” But after it faced widespread criticism, including from the governor of Illinois, OpenAI put out a statement claiming it had never supported the liability safe harbor provision.

In our interview, Lehane suggested OpenAI’s blanket support of the original legislation was an oversight. “I don’t think we were explicit at all on what we were definitely for and what we were not supporting,” Lehane says. “That was on us.” When asked if OpenAI was involved in drafting the bill, he said that the company “certainly shared our thoughts,” though he added the ChatGPT-maker simply wanted to advocate for AI rules similar to California and New York’s.

OpenAI has more recently come out in support of a different bill in Illinois, which would be one of the strongest AI laws in the nation, requiring leading AI companies to have their safety practices audited by outside third parties. The legislation has also been endorsed by OpenAI’s biggest rival, Anthropic, and it passed through the Illinois Senate on Thursday.

---

This is an edition of Maxwell Zeff’s Model Behavior newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.