person
Helen Toner
Director of Strategy at CSET; former OpenAI board member
Policy researcher who served on the OpenAI board and voted to remove Sam Altman in November 2023. Now runs strategy at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology and is a prominent voice on AI governance.
Profile
expertise
Policy / meta
Specialises in AI policy, regulation, governance, philanthropy, or movement strategy. Reads the technical literature but does not produce it.
Interim Executive Director of Georgetown's CSET (Sept 2025); previously Director of Strategy. Former OpenAI board member. China-AI-policy expertise. Reads research; does not produce ML research.
recognition
Field-leading
Widely known inside the AI and AI-safety community. Appears repeatedly in top venues, podcasts, or governance forums. Not a household name to outsiders.
Extensive press during November 2023 OpenAI board episode. Senate testimony; TIME 100 AI 2024. Recognised in policy circles, less to general public.
vintage
Scaling era
Worldview formed during GPT-2/3, scaling laws, Anthropic's founding. Pre-ChatGPT but post-deep-learning. The 'scale is all you need' debate is live.
Joined CSET (founded 2019). OpenAI board ~2021. China-AI policy work from the scaling-era window.
Hand-classified. See the board for the criteria and the full grid.
Strategy positions
Governance firstendorses
Lead with regulation, treaties, liability regimesCalls for empowered oversight bodies, mandatory reporting, and clearer lines between frontier labs and investors.
“For years, Sam had made it really difficult for the board to do its job by withholding information, misrepresenting things, and in some cases outright lying to the board.”
Context: TED AI podcast interview with Bilawal Sidhu after her departure from the OpenAI board.
There is a potential race to the bottom on safety as AI companies compete for market share. We argue this is a problem that needs collective action to solve.
Context: From her co-authored paper 'Decoding Intentions: Artificial Intelligence and Costly Signals', the paper that preceded the OpenAI board clash.
Closest strategy neighbours
by jaccard overlapOther people whose strategy tags overlap with Helen Toner's. Overlap is on tag identity, not stance; opposites can show up if they reference the same tags.
Record last updated 2026-04-24.