Three months ago, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman told me his concern on the growing public relations crisis facing artificial intelligence companies: Despite the popularity of tools like ChatGPT, a growing number of people said they viewed AI negatively. Since then, the opposition has only grown.
Speakers starting college now get booed by talking about AI in optimistic terms. Last month, someone gave us a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s San Francisco home and wrote a manifesto advocating crime against AI practitioners. No one has more to lose from this reputational crisis than OpenAI.
The man tasked with trying to fix it is Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s head of global affairs and veteran political activist. I sat down with him this week to discuss what I would argue are his two biggest challenges yet: persuading the world to embrace OpenAI technology, while simultaneously persuading lawmakers to pass regulations that won’t stifle the company’s growth. Lehane sees these goals as one in the same.
“When I was in the White House, we always talked about how good policy is equal to good politics,” says Lehane. “You have to think about these two things going together.”
After working on crisis communications in Bill Clinton’s White House, Lehane earned the nickname “disaster master.” He later helped Airbnb block regulators in cities that saw short-term rentals as existing in a legal gray area, or as he puts it, “on the brink of the law.” Lehane also played a key role in creating Fairshake, a crypto industry super PAC that worked to legalize digital currencies in Washington. Since joining OpenAI in 2024, he has been one of the company’s most prominent executives and now oversees its communications and policy teams.
Lehane tells me the public narrative about how AI will change society is often “contradictory.” On one side is the “Bob Ross worldview” that predicts a future where no one has to work anymore and everyone lives in “beach houses painting watercolors all day.” On the other hand it is a dystopian future in which AI has become so powerful that only a small group of elites have the ability to control it. Neither situation, in Lehane’s opinion, is very real.
OpenAI is guilty of promoting this kind of discursive discourse in the past. CEO Sam Altman warned last year that “all working classes” will disappear when unity comes. More recently he has lowered his voice, to announce that “functional impairment can be fatal in the long term.”
Lehane wants OpenAI to start delivering a more “balanced” message about AI’s promises that avoids either of these extremes. He says the company needs to put real solutions to the problems people are concerned about, such as possible job losses and the negative effects of chatbots on children. As an example of this work, Lehane pointed to a list of policy recommendations that OpenAI recently published, which include creating a four-day work week, expanding access to healthcare, and passing a tax on AI-powered workers.
“If you’re going to go out there and say there’s a challenge here, then you also have a responsibility—especially if you’re building these things—to come up with ideas to solve those things,” Lehane says.
Some former OpenAI employees, however, have accused the company of downplaying the potential adoption of AI. WIRED previously reported that members of OpenAI’s economic research unit quit after becoming concerned that this was the case becoming a defense arm for the company. Former employees said that their warnings about the economic impact of AI may not be appropriate for OpenAI, but they faithfully reflected what the company’s research found.
Punch Packing
With public skepticism towards AI growing, politicians are under pressure to prove to voters they can control technology companies. To combat this, the AI industry has created a new group of super PACs that promote pro-AI political candidates and try influence public opinion about technology. Critics say the move backfired, and some candidates have backed out started a campaign on the truth that AI super PACS opposes them.
Lehane helped start one of the best pro-AI PACs, Leading the Future, which launched last summer with more than $100 million in funding pledges from tech industry figures, including Brockman. The group has opposed Alex Boresthe author of New York’s toughest AI security law who is running for Congress in the state’s 12th district.
