Three months ago, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman told me of his concerns about the growing public relations crisis facing AI companies: Despite the popularity of tools like ChatGPT, a growing portion of the population has said they view AI negatively. Since then, the backlash has only intensified.
College commencement speakers are now booed for talking about artificial intelligence in hopeful terms. Last month, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s San Francisco home and wrote a manifesto endorsing crimes against AI executives. No one has more to lose from a reputation crisis than OpenAI.
The person tasked with fixing this problem is Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s head of global affairs and a seasoned political operative. I met with him this week to discuss what I believe are his two biggest challenges to date: persuading the world to embrace OpenAI technology while persuading lawmakers to pass regulations that won’t impede the company’s growth. Lehane sees these goals as one in the same.
“When I was in the White House, we always talked about good policy equaling good policy,” Lehane says. “You have to think about both of these things moving together.”
After working on crisis communications in Bill Clinton’s White House, Lehane nicknamed himself “the master of disaster.” He later helped Airbnb fend off regulators in cities that viewed short-term home rentals as being in a legal gray area or, as he put it, “ahead of the law.” Lehane also played a key role in the founding of Fairshake, a powerful crypto industry super PAC that worked to legitimize digital currencies in Washington. Since joining OpenAI in 2024, he has quickly become one of the company’s most influential executives and currently oversees its communications and policy teams.
Lehane tells me that public narratives about how AI will change society are often “artificially binary.” On the one hand, there’s “Bob Ross’s worldview,” which predicts a future where no one has to work anymore and everyone lives in “beach houses, painting watercolors all day.” On the other hand, a dystopian future where artificial intelligence has become so powerful that only a petite group of elites are able to control it. According to Lehane, neither scenario is very realistic.
OpenAI has been guilty of promoting this kind of polarizing language in the past. CEO Sam Altman warned last year that “entire classes of professions” will disappear when the singularity arrives. He has softened his tone lately, declaring that “employment doomerism is likely to be a long-term mistake.”
Lehane wants OpenAI to start sending a more “calibrated” message about the promises of AI that avoids either of these extremes. He says the company needs to come up with real solutions to the problems people worry about, such as potential widespread job losses and the negative impact of chatbots on children. Lehane provided a list as an example of this work policy proposals recently published by OpenAI, which include creating a four-day work week, expanding access to healthcare and introducing a tax on artificial intelligence work.
“If you’re going to say there are challenges here, you also have an obligation – especially if you’re building this material – to actually put forward ideas on how to solve those problems,” Lehane says.
However, some former OpenAI employees accused the company of downplaying the potential disadvantages of implementing artificial intelligence. WIRED previously reported that members of OpenAI’s economic research unit quit after becoming concerned that it was turning into a support arm of the company. Former employees argued that their warnings about the economic impacts of AI may have been uncomfortable for OpenAI, but they honestly reflected what the company’s research had shown.
Packing stamps
Amid growing public skepticism about artificial intelligence, politicians are under pressure to prove to voters that they can control tech companies. To combat this, the AI industry has launched a new group of super PACs that support pro-AI political candidates and attempt to influence public opinion about the technology. Critics say this move has backfired, and some candidates have launched campaigns based on the fact that superPACS AI opposes them.
Lehane helped found one of the largest pro-AI super PACs, Leading the Future, which launched last summer with more than $100 million in funding from tech industry figures including Brockman. The group opposed Alex Bores, the author of Novel York’s toughest artificial intelligence security law, who is running for Congress in the state’s 12th District.