Helen Toner is an Australian AI policy researcher and Director of Strategy and Foundational Research Grants at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). She served on the board of the OpenAI non-profit from 2021 to November 2023 and was one of the four board members who voted to remove Sam Altman as chief executive on 17 November 2023, the event widely described as "the OpenAI board crisis." She is a frequent congressional testimony witness on AI governance and a policy voice on US–China AI competition.
Background
Toner was an early hire at Open Philanthropy. She subsequently spent a year based in Beijing studying China's AI ecosystem before joining CSET at its 2019 founding. She joined the OpenAI non-profit board in 2021.
Roles
As Director of Strategy and Foundational Research Grants at CSET, Toner shapes the organization's research agenda on compute, supply chains, AI capabilities forecasting, and governance. She co-founded CSET's strategy function and helped establish CSET as the most cited US think tank on AI and national security.
As an OpenAI board member from 2021 to 2023, she co-authored scholarly work on AI governance that Altman cited internally as a factor in tensions; she ultimately voted to remove him. After the firing she published a public account of the events, including the claim that the board was not told in advance about the release of ChatGPT. Her later public statements on the November 2023 board crisis include appearances at TED AI, on podcasts, and in The Economist.
She testifies frequently before the US Congress, including the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees, on frontier AI risks.
Positions and statements
Toner emphasizes that the AI-risk problem is only partially technical, arguing that corporate governance, board independence, and institutional design are load-bearing elements of AI safety. She is critical of self-regulation at frontier labs, citing the OpenAI board episode as her primary empirical argument: internal governance at the leading lab failed visibly, which she has presented as evidence for external oversight.
On compute, she holds the CSET-aligned position that compute is the most tractable governance surface for frontier AI (see Compute Governance). On US–China competition, she supports export controls but resists hawkish framings, arguing for clear-eyed analysis of Chinese capabilities rather than racing rhetoric; she set out this view in "The Illusion of China's AI Prowess" (Foreign Affairs, 2023). She advocates transparency and disclosure mandates, including pre-deployment testing, incident reporting, and whistleblower protections, many of which appeared in SB 53.
Selected works
- CSET research on AI governance, compute, and talent flows
- "The Illusion of China's AI Prowess" (Foreign Affairs, 2023)
- Congressional testimony across multiple hearings on frontier AI
Relationships
- leads strategy at: Center for Security and Emerging Technology
- related: OpenAI — former board member; high-profile departure context
- supports: Compute Governance, Export Controls (AI), California SB 53 — Transparency in Frontier AI Act, AI Safety Cases and Frameworks
- related: Lennart Heim — CSET-adjacent compute-governance collaborator