University commencement speakers are now being booed for speaking about artificial intelligence in optimistic terms. Last month, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in San Francisco and wrote a manifesto calling for crimes against AI executives. No one has more to lose from this reputation crisis than OpenAI.
The person tasked with trying to fix this problem is Chris Lehane, head of global affairs at OpenAI and a veteran political activist. I sat down with him this week to discuss what I believe are his two biggest challenges yet: convincing the world to embrace OpenAI technology, while at the same time convincing lawmakers to adopt regulations that don’t hinder the company’s growth. Lehane believes that 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 those two things moving in concert.”
After working in crisis communications in Bill Clinton’s White House, Lehane called himself the “Master of Disaster.” Later, he helped Airbnb fend off city regulators who deemed short-term home rentals to be in a legal gray area, or, as he put it, “ahead of the law.” Lehane was also instrumental in forming Fairshake, a powerful cryptocurrency industry political action committee that worked to legalize cryptocurrencies in Washington. Since joining OpenAI in 2024, he has quickly become one of the company’s most influential executives and now oversees the communications and policy teams.
Public narratives about how AI will change society are often “artificially binary,” Lehane told me. On one side is Bob Ross’s “Vision of the World” that predicts a future where no one has to work anymore and everyone lives in “beachside houses that paint in watercolors all day long.” On the other hand, there is a dystopian future in which artificial intelligence has become so powerful that only a small group of elites have the ability to control it. Neither scenario, in Lehane’s opinion, is very realistic.
OpenAI is guilty of promoting this kind of polarizing rhetoric in the past. CEO Sam Altman warned last year that “entire categories of jobs” would disappear when singularity came. More recently, he has softened his tone, declaring that “eliminating jobs is likely to be a mistake in the long run.”
Lehane wants OpenAI to start conveying a more “calibrated” message about the promise of AI that avoids either of these extremes. He says the company needs to come up with real solutions to problems that worry people, such as the potential for widespread job losses and the negative effects of chatbots on children. As an example of this work, Lehane pointed to a list of policy proposals recently published by OpenAI, which include creating a four-day workweek, expanding access to health care, and passing a tax on AI-driven labor.
“If you’re going to come out and say there are challenges here, you also have to – especially if you’re building these things – actually come up with ideas to solve these things,” Lehane says.
However, some former OpenAI employees have accused the company of downplaying the potential downsides of AI adoption. WIRED previously reported that members of OpenAI’s economic research unit resigned after becoming concerned that it was turning into an advocacy arm of the company. The former employees argued that their warnings about the economic impacts of AI may have been inappropriate for OpenAI, but they faithfully reflected what the company’s research had found.
Packing punches
As public skepticism toward artificial intelligence grows, politicians are under pressure to prove to voters that they can rein in technology companies. To combat this, the AI industry has formed a new group of super PACs that promote pro-AI political candidates and try to influence public opinion about the technology. Critics say the move backfired, and some candidates began campaigning on the basis that AI super PACS opposed them.
Lehane helped create one of the largest pro-AI political action committees, Leadership the Future, which launched last summer with more than $100 million in funding commitments from tech industry figures, including Brockman. The group was opposed by Alex Burris, the author of New York’s strongest AI safety law who is running for Congress in the state’s 12th District.
