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. Packing Punches 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.