The Fixer’s Dilemma: Chris Lehane and OpenAI‘s Shifting Ground
I’d recently observed a master class in political messaging - Chris Lehane skillfully navigating tough questions about company decisions, even those he may privately disagree with. Then, new developments surfaced, further complicating an already complex situation.
Nathan Calvin, an AI policy lawyer with the nonprofit Encode AI, revealed that while I was speaking with Lehane in Toronto, OpenAI dispatched a sheriff’s deputy to Calvin’s home in Washington, D.C., during dinner to serve him a subpoena. The company sought Calvin’s private messages with California legislators,college students,and former OpenAI employees.
Calvin asserts this action was part of OpenAI’s intimidation tactics surrounding California’s SB 53, a proposed AI regulation. He alleges the company leveraged its legal dispute with Elon Musk as a justification to target critics, suggesting encode AI was secretly funded by Musk. Calvin actively opposed OpenAI’s opposition to SB 53, an AI safety bill, and stated he “literally laughed out loud” at OpenAI’s claim that it “worked to improve the bill.” He subsequently labeled Lehane the “master of the political dark arts” on social media.
In Washington, such a description might be considered a compliment. However, within a company like OpenAI, whose stated mission is “to build AI that benefits all of humanity,” it feels like a serious indictment.
More significantly, internal dissent is growing within OpenAI itself.
As my colleague Max reported last week,numerous current and former employees voiced concerns on social media following the release of Sora 2. Boaz Barak, an OpenAI researcher and Harvard professor, described sora 2 as “technically amazing but it’s premature to congratulate ourselves on avoiding the pitfalls of other social media apps and deepfakes.”
On Friday, Josh Achiam - OpenAI’s head of mission alignment - posted a particularly striking message regarding Calvin’s accusations. Acknowledging the potential risk to his career, Achiam wrote that OpenAI ”can’t be doing things that make us into a frightening power rather of a virtuous one.We have a duty to and a mission for all of humanity. The bar to pursue that duty is remarkably high.”
This is a pivotal moment. An openai executive publicly questioning whether his company is becoming “a frightening power instead of a virtuous one” carries far more weight than criticism from competitors or inquiries from reporters. Achiam chose to work at OpenAI, believing in its mission, and is now openly acknowledging a crisis of conscience despite the potential professional repercussions.
This moment crystallizes the contradictions that may intensify as OpenAI progresses toward artificial general intelligence. It shifts the central question from whether Chris Lehane can effectively sell OpenAI’s mission, to whether those within the company – and especially its employees - still believe in it.