Can OpenAI’s ‘Master of Disaster’ Fix AI’s Reputation Crisis?

Three months ago, OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman told me his concerns about a mounting public relations crisis facing artificial intelligence companies: Despite the popularity of tools like ChatGPT, an increasingly large share of the population said they viewed AI negatively. Since then, the backlash has only intensified.

College commencement speakers are now getting booed for talking about AI in optimistic terms. Last month, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s San Francisco home and wrote a manifesto advocating for crimes against AI executives. No one has more to lose from this reputation crisis than OpenAI.

The person tasked with trying to fix it 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’d argue are his two biggest challenges yet: convincing the world to embrace OpenAI’s technology, while at the same time persuading lawmakers to adopt regulations that won’t hamper the company’s growth. Lehane views these goals as one in the same.

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

After working on crisis communications in Bill Clinton’s White House, Lehane gave himself the nickname “master of disaster.” He later helped Airbnb fend 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 the formation of 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 change 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 in which AI 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 speech in the past. CEO Sam Altman warned last year that “whole classes of jobs” will go away when the singularity arrives. More recently he has softened his tone, declaring that “jobs doomerism is likely long-term wrong.”

Lehane wants OpenAI to start conveying a more “calibrated” message about the promises of AI that avoids either of these extremes. He says the company needs to put forward real solutions to the problems people are worried about, such as potential widespread job loss and the negative impacts of chatbots on children. As an example of this work, Lehane pointed to a list of policy proposals that OpenAI recently published, which include creating 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 potential downsides of AI adoption. WIRED previously reported that members of OpenAI’s economic research unit quit after they became concerned that it was morphing into an advocacy arm for the company. The former employees argued that their warnings about AI’s economic impacts may have been inconvenient for OpenAI, but they honestly reflected what the company’s research found.

With public skepticism toward AI growing, politicians are under pressure to prove to voters they can rein in tech companies. To combat this, the AI industry has stood up a new group of super PACs that are boosting pro-AI political candidates and trying to influence public opinion about the technology. Critics say the move backfired, and some candidates have started campaigning on the fact that AI super PACS are opposing them.

Lehane helped set up one of the biggest 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 political donations to Leading the Future, as well as to President Trump’s Super PAC, were inspired by 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 have similar goals.

Lehane tells me he consulted Brockman on his recent political spending, but only in “a very general way.” At another point in our conversations, 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 efforts since it launched. He has tried instead 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.

Lehane compares OpenAI to the companies that built earlier foundational utilities like railroads and electricity. While OpenAI has yet to prove its products are as critical as those technologies, it’s leaping ahead to working hand in hand with the US 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 essentially mirror one another. The goal is to “harmonize” the new bills with legislation already on the books in California and New York and prevent lawmakers from creating a patchwork of different rules across the country, which Lehane argues would derail innovation.

In practice, OpenAI has also advocated for policies that would give even more deference 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, so 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 said it was “an initiative of OpenAI.” But after it was widely criticized, including by the governor of Illinois, OpenAI put out a statement claiming it had never supported the liability safe harbor provision.

In our interview, Lehane seemed to suggest OpenAI’s blanket support of the 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 said the ChatGPT-maker simply wanted to advocate for similar AI laws to California and New York.

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.