TIME100 AI 2024: Helen Toner

Sep 05, 2024

# Helen Toner

by

[Billy Perrigo](https://time.com/author/billy-perrigo/)

Correspondent

![](https://gcp-na-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc50625046df3cf7d/698a5a99d075332a01e712ea/TIME100-AI-2024-THINKERS_Helen-Toner-NEW.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=3:2)

Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source: Courtesy of Helen Toner)

In mid-November of 2023, Helen Toner made what will likely be the most pivotal decision of her career.

Together with three other members of OpenAI’s board, she voted to fire Sam Altman from his role as the company’s CEO. At the time, Toner and her fellow board members were silent about their reasons, saying only that Altman had “not been consistently candid” with them. In the information vacuum, a pressure campaign by Altman’s allies to reinstate him gained momentum. Silicon Valley luminaries, venture capitalists, and OpenAI’s biggest investor, Microsoft, joined the effort—as did most of OpenAI’s employees, whose equity in the company appeared to be at risk of losing most or all of its value. Five days later, Altman was back in the CEO’s chair. Outmaneuvered, Toner and all but one of the other board members who fired Altman agreed to step down.

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Toner would later elaborate, [alleging](https://www.transformernews.ai/p/sam-altman-was-outright-lying-to "undefined") that Altman had not informed the board of possible conflicts of interest resulting from his financial ties to OpenAI’s startup fund, had given the board “inaccurate information” about OpenAI’s safety processes, and had lied to other board members in an attempt to push her out. “For years, Sam had made it really difficult for the board to actually do \[its\] job by withholding information, misrepresenting things that were happening at the company, in some cases outright lying to the board,” she said on a TED [podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/what-really-went-down-at-openai-and-the-future/id1741574582?i=1000657049960 "undefined") in May. (“We do not accept the claims made by Ms. Toner \[...\] regarding events at OpenAI,” two of the company’s new board members, Bret Taylor and Larry Summers, [wrote](https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2024/05/30/openai-board-members-respond-to-a-warning-by-former-members "undefined") two days later, adding that an independent review found Altman had not acted improperly.)

Besides securing Altman’s place at OpenAI, one outcome of the drama was that Toner, a formerly obscure expert in AI governance based at Georgetown University, now has the ear of policymakers around the world trying to regulate AI. She notes that this year, more senior officials have requested her insights than in any previous year.

If she tells those policymakers in private what she has said in public, they’ll hear that self-governance by AI companies doesn't actually work. Instead, Toner believes governments must step in. “Even with the best of intentions, without extern

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