In an interview, AI academic Helen Toner explains her posture in OpenAI’s power struggle
4 min
Helen Toner was a relatively unknown 31-year-old academic from Australia—until she became one of the four board members who fired Sam Altman from the artificial-intelligence company he co-founded.
Thrust into the spotlight during the ouster and eventual return of Altman as CEO of OpenAI last month, Toner has emerged as a symbol of tension between AI-safety advocates and those giving priority to technological progress.
Toner maintains that safety wasn’t the reason the board wanted to fire Altman. Rather, it was a lack of trust. On that basis, she said, dismissing him was consistent with the OpenAI board’s duty to ensure AI systems are built responsibly.
“Our goal in firing Sam was to strengthen OpenAI and make it more able to achieve its mission,” she said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
Toner held on to that belief when, amid a revolt by employees over Altman’s firing, a lawyer for OpenAI said she could be in violation of her fiduciary duties if the board’s decision to fire him led the company to fall apart, Toner said.
“He was trying to claim that it would be illegal for us not to resign immediately, because if the company fell apart we would be in breach of our fiduciary duties,” she told the Journal. “But OpenAI is a very unusual organization, and the nonprofit mission—to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity—comes first,” she said, referring to artificial general intelligence.
Ultimately, Toner and some other board members did resign, clearing the way for Altman’s return.
In the interview, Toner declined to provide specific details on why she and the three others voted to fire Altman from OpenAI. Before his ousting, Altman and Toner had clashed.
In October, Toner, who is director of strategy at a think tank in Washington, D.C., co-wrote a paper on AI safety. The paper said OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT sparked a “sense of urgency inside major tech companies” that led them to fast-track AI products to keep up. It also said Anthropic, an OpenAI competitor, avoided “stoking the flames of AI hype” by waiting to release its chatbot.
After publication, Altman confronted Toner, saying she had harmed OpenAI by criticising the company so publicly. Then he went behind her back, people familiar with the situation said.
Altman approached other board members, trying to convince each to fire Toner. Later, some board members swapped notes on their individual discussions with Altman. The group concluded that in one discussion with a board member, Altman left a misleading perception that another member thought Toner should leave, the people said.
By this point, several of OpenAI’s then-directors already had concerns about Altman’s honesty, people familiar with their thinking said. His efforts to unseat Toner, parts of which were previously reported by the New Yorker, added to what those people said was a series of actions that slowly chipped away at their trust in Altman and led to his unexpected firing on the Friday before Thanksgiving.
The board members weren’t prepared for the fallout from their decision.
The members, including Toner, were taken aback by staffers’ apparent willingness to abandon the company without Altman at the helm and the extent to which the management team sided with the ousted CEO, according to people familiar with the matter.
Toner took her account on social-media platform X private during the height of the crisis.
At one point during the heated negotiations, a lawyer for OpenAI said the board’s decision to fire Altman could lead to the company’s collapse. “That would actually be consistent with the mission,” Toner replied at the time, startling some executives in the room.
In the interview, Toner said that comment was in response to what she took as an “intimidation tactic” by the lawyer. She says she was trying to convey that the continued existence of OpenAI isn’t, by definition, necessary for the nonprofit’s broader mission of creating artificial general intelligence that benefits humanity at large. A simultaneous concern of researchers is that AGI, an AI system that can do tasks better than most humans, could also cause harm.
“In this case, of course, we all worked very hard to ensure the company could continue succeeding,” she added.
OpenAI has an unusual structure where a nonprofit board, on which Toner served, oversees the work of a for-profit arm. The board’s mandate is to “humanity,” not investors.
In the interview, Toner didn’t answer questions about her interactions with Altman. She wouldn’t comment on whether she would have done anything differently but said she had good intentions.
Before he was reinstated, Altman offered to apologise for his behaviour toward Toner over her paper, according to people familiar with the matter. Ultimately, he returned to lead the company without following through on that gesture.
Toner is known in the AI-safety world for being a critical thinker who isn’t afraid to challenge commonly held beliefs.
Some of Altman’s backers, including OpenAI investor Vinod Khosla, publicly expressed derision specifically toward Toner and Tasha McCauley, another former OpenAI board member who voted to fire Altman and is connected to organisations that promote effective altruism.
“Fancy titles like ‘Director of Strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology’ can lead to a false sense of understanding of the complex process of entrepreneurial innovation,” Khosla wrote in an essay in tech-news publication the Information, referring to Toner and her current position.
“OpenAI’s board members’ religion of ‘effective altruism’ and its misapplication could have set back the world’s path to the tremendous benefits of artificial intelligence,” he wrote amid the power struggle.
Toner was previously an active member of the effective-altruism community, which is multifaceted but shares a belief in doing good in the world—even if that means simply making a lot of money and giving it to worthy recipients. In recent years, Toner has started distancing herself from the EA movement.
“Like any group, the community has changed quite a lot since 2014, as have I,” she said.
Toner graduated from the University of Melbourne, Australia, in 2014 with a degree in chemical engineering and subsequently worked as a research analyst at a series of firms, including Open Philanthropy, a foundation that makes grants based on the effective-altruism philosophy.
In 2019, she spent nine months in Beijing studying its AI ecosystem. When she returned, Toner helped establish a research organisation at Georgetown University, called the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, where she continues to work.
She succeeded her former manager from Open Philanthropy, Holden Karnofsky, on the OpenAI board in 2021 after he stepped down. His wife co-founded OpenAI rival Anthropic.
“Helen brings an understanding of the global AI landscape with an emphasis on safety, which is critical for our efforts and mission,” Altman said when she joined the board.
The new board members along with returning board member Adam D’Angelo offer a glimpse of the direction OpenAI might be headed. Larry Summers, former Treasury secretary, and Bret Taylor, former Salesforce co-CEO, appear to be more traditionally business-minded than Toner, McCauley and the third board member who was succeeded, Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist.
There are no longer any women on the board, though the company is expected to expand it in coming months.
“I think looking forward is the best path from here,” Toner said.
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The lunar flyby would be the deepest humans have traveled in space in decades.
4 min
It’s go time for the highest-stakes mission at NASA in more than 50 years.
On April 1, the agency is set to launch four astronauts around the moon, the deepest human spaceflight since the final Apollo lunar landing in 1972.
The launch window for Artemis II , as the mission is called, opens at 6:24 p.m. ET.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration teams have been preparing the vehicles to depart from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on the planned roughly 10-day trip. Crew members have trained for years for this moment.
Reid Wiseman, the NASA astronaut serving as mission commander, said he doesn’t fear taking the voyage. A widower, he does worry at times about what he is putting his daughters through.
“I could have a very comfortable life for them,” Wiseman said in an interview last September.
“But I’m also a human, and I see the spirit in their eyes that is burning in my soul too. And so we’ve just got to never stop going.”
Wiseman’s crewmates on Artemis II are NASA’s Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
What are the goals for Artemis II?
The biggest one: Safely fly the crew on vehicles that have never carried astronauts before.
The towering Space Launch System rocket has the job of lofting a vehicle called Orion into space and on its way to the moon.
Orion is designed to carry the crew around the moon and back. Myriad systems on the ship—life support, communications, navigation—will be tested with the astronauts on board.
SLS and Orion don’t have much flight experience. The vehicles last flew in 2022, when the agency completed its uncrewed Artemis I mission .
How is the mission expected to unfold?
Artemis II will begin when SLS takes off from a launchpad in Florida with Orion stacked on top of it.
The so-called upper stage of SLS will later separate from the main part of the rocket with Orion attached, and use its engine to set up the latter vehicle for a push to the moon.
After Orion separates from the upper stage, it will conduct what is called a translunar injection—the engine firing that commits Orion to soaring out to the moon. It will fly to the moon over the course of a few days and travel around its far side.
Orion will face a tough return home after speeding through space. As it hits Earth’s atmosphere, Orion will be flying at 25,000 miles an hour and face temperatures of 5,000 degrees as it slows down. The capsule is designed to land under parachutes in the Pacific Ocean, not far from San Diego.
Is it possible Artemis II will be delayed?
Yes.
For safety reasons, the agency won’t launch if certain tough weather conditions roll through the Cape Canaveral, Fla., area. Delays caused by technical problems are possible, too. NASA has other dates identified for the mission if it doesn’t begin April 1.
Who are the astronauts flying on Artemis II?
The crew will be led by Wiseman, a retired Navy pilot who completed military deployments before joining NASA’s astronaut corps. He traveled to the International Space Station in 2014.
Two other astronauts will represent NASA during the mission: Glover, an experienced Navy pilot, and Koch, who began her career as an electrical engineer for the agency and once spent a year at a research station in the South Pole. Both have traveled to the space station before.
Hansen is a military pilot who joined Canada’s astronaut corps in 2009. He will be making his first trip to space.
Koch’s participation in Artemis II will mark the first time a woman has flown beyond orbits near Earth. Glover and Hansen will be the first African-American and non-American astronauts, respectively, to do the same.
What will the astronauts do during the flight?
The astronauts will evaluate how Orion flies, practice emergency procedures and capture images of the far side of the moon for scientific and exploration purposes (they may become the first humans to see parts of the far side of the lunar surface). Health-tracking projects of the astronauts are designed to inform future missions.
Those efforts will play out in Orion’s crew module, which has about two minivans worth of living area.
On board, the astronauts will spend about 30 minutes a day exercising, using a device that allows them to do dead lifts, rowing and more. Sleep will come in eight-hour stretches in hammocks.
There is a custom-made warmer for meals, with beef brisket and veggie quiche on the menu.
Each astronaut is permitted two flavored beverages a day, including coffee. The crew will hold one hourlong shared meal each day.
The Universal Waste Management System—that’s the toilet—uses air flow to pull fluid and solid waste away into containers.
What happens after Artemis II?
Assuming it goes well, NASA will march on to Artemis III, scheduled for next year. During that operation, NASA plans to launch Orion with crew members on board and have the ship practice docking with lunar-lander vehicles that Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have been developing. The rendezvous operations will occur relatively close to Earth.
NASA hopes that its contractors and the agency itself are ready to attempt one or more lunar landing missions in 2028. Many current and former spaceflight officials are skeptical that timeline is feasible.
