Often called a “master of the political dark arts,” Lehane is known for helping to defeat San Francisco legislation that would have limited short-term housing rentals by convincing lawmakers that an “Airbnb voter” existed in 2015. He later helped the crypto industry bully oppositional candidates into submission, resulting in huge regulatory victories for the industry. In 2024, after advising Altman on his effort to reclaim the CEO seat following the board’s surprise ouster, Lehane joined OpenAI full-time to run global affairs.
But as Charles Duhigg wrote in his 2024 New Yorker profile, part of Lehane’s magic was his ability to “appeal to politicians’ higher ideals” and make “the people he worked with feel like they were on a righteous quest.”
I suspected that Lehane’s vision for TBPN was less about product or business concerns and more about harnessing its irresistible goodwill to help rescue AI’s public image.
I hopped on a call with Lehane late Friday afternoon, and he told me as much. “There needs to be an enormous effort to educate the public on…both the opportunities and the challenges” that AI represents, he told me. “And I think these guys are uniquely capable of doing it.”
On a call with Coogan earlier that afternoon, he shared something similar with me. “Instead of focusing on lab rivalries and day-to-day back-and-forth between different companies,” Coogan told me, the next iteration of the show will focus on big-picture questions, like “What is the American AI industry doing? Is AI deployment going well? What can we do better?”
Frankly, this playbook makes total sense to me. The only thing I don’t understand is where on earth Lehane has been for the last 20 months.
I last profiled Sam Altman in 2023, when he was still playing the idealistic foil to Elon Musk’s new anti-woke, dark MAGA persona. (His signature move at the time was pleading for more regulation and warning of the dangers of AI even as he built it.) But as vice signaling spread across Silicon Valley, Altman and his company fell increasingly in line.
By the fall of 2025, it felt like most of the AI industry was engaged in a race to the bottom. When xAI launched its anime sexbot companions and Meta debuted Vibes, an endless feed of AI-generated video slop, I expected OpenAI to distinguish itself by leaning into its serious scientific research and promises of AI-enabled abundance.
Instead, OpenAI announced its own video generation tool, Sora 2. Two weeks after that, Altman declared a bizarre victory against mental health challenges associated with chatbots—even as a lawsuit worked its way through court accusing OpenAI of contributing to a teenager’s suicide. He even announced that OpenAI would begin rolling out adult services like interactive erotica.
Even as the virtue-signaling Anthropic gobbled up more and more of its customers, OpenAI seemed to remain oddly resistant to paying even the slightest lip service to the greater good. In December, OpenAI’s long-tenured chief of communications left the company. The role has yet to be permanently filled.