Chris Lehane is one of the best in the business at making bad news disappear. Al Gore\u2019s press secretary during the Clinton years, Airbnb\u2019s chief crisis manager through every regulatory nightmare from here to Brussels \u2013 Lehane knows how to spin. Now he\u2019s two years into what might be his most impossible gig yet: as OpenAI\u2019s VP of global policy, his job is to convince the world that OpenAI genuinely gives a damn about democratizing artificial intelligence while the company increasingly behaves like, well, every other tech giant that\u2019s ever claimed to be different.<\/p>\n
I had 20 minutes with him on stage at the Elevate<\/a> conference in Toronto earlier this week \u2013 20 minutes to get past the talking points and into the real contradictions eating away at OpenAI\u2019s carefully constructed image. It wasn\u2019t easy or entirely successful. Lehane is genuinely good at his job. He\u2019s likable. He sounds reasonable. He admits uncertainty. He even talks about waking up at 3 a.m. worried about whether any of this will actually benefit humanity.<\/p>\n But good intentions don\u2019t mean much when your company is subpoenaing critics, draining economically depressed towns of water and electricity, and bringing dead celebrities back to life to assert your market dominance.<\/p>\n The company\u2019s Sora problem is really at the root of everything else. The video generation tool launched last week with copyrighted material seemingly baked right into it. It was a bold move for a company already getting sued by the New York Times, the Toronto Star, and half the publishing industry. From a business and marketing standpoint, it was also brilliant. The invite-only app soared to the top of the App Store<\/a> as people created digital versions of themselves, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman; characters like Pikachu and Cartman of \u201cSouth Park\u201d; and dead celebrities like Tupac Shakur.<\/p>\n Asked what drove OpenAI\u2019s decision to launch this newest version of Sora with these characters, Lehane offered that Sora is a \u201cgeneral purpose technology\u201d like the printing press, democratizing creativity for people without talent or resources. Even he \u2013 a self-described creative zero \u2013 can make videos now, he said on stage.<\/p>\n What he danced around is that OpenAI initially \u201clet\u201d rights holders opt out of having their work used to train Sora, which is not how copyright use typically works. Then, after OpenAI noticed that people really liked using copyrighted images, it \u201cevolved\u201d toward an opt-in model<\/a>. That\u2019s not iterating. That\u2019s testing how much you can get away with. (By the way, though the Motion Picture Association made some noise<\/a> last week about legal threats, OpenAI appears to have gotten away with quite a lot.)<\/p>\n Naturally, the situation brings to mind the aggravation of publishers who accuse OpenAI of training on their work without sharing the financial spoils. When I pressed Lehane about publishers getting cut out of the economics, he invoked fair use, that American legal doctrine that\u2019s supposed to balance creator rights against public access to knowledge. He called it the secret weapon of U.S. tech dominance.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco Maybe. But I\u2019d recently interviewed Al Gore<\/a> \u2013 Lehane\u2019s old boss \u2013 and realized anyone could simply ask ChatGPT about it instead of reading my piece on TechCrunch. \u201cIt\u2019s \u2018iterative\u2019,\u201d I said, \u201cbut it\u2019s also a replacement.\u201d<\/p>\n Lehane listened and dropped his spiel. \u201cWe\u2019re all going to need to figure this out,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s really glib and easy to sit here on stage and say we need to figure out new economic revenue models. But I think we will.\u201d (We\u2019re making it up as we go, is what I heard.)<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the infrastructure question nobody wants to answer honestly. OpenAI is already operating a data center campus in Abilene, Texas, and recently broke ground on a massive data center in Lordstown, Ohio, in partnership with Oracle and SoftBank. Lehane has likened the adoption of AI to the advent of electricity \u2013 saying those who accessed it last are still playing catch-up \u2013 yet OpenAI\u2019s Stargate project is seemingly targeting some of those same economically challenged places to set up facilities with their attendant and massive appetites for water and electricity.<\/p>\n Asked during our sit-down whether these communities will benefit or merely foot the bill, Lehane went to gigawatts and geopolitics. OpenAI needs about a gigawatt of energy per week, he noted. China brought on 450 gigawatts last year plus 33 nuclear facilities. If democracies want democratic AI, he said, they have to compete. \u201cThe optimist in me says this will modernize our energy systems,\u201d he\u2019d said, painting a picture of re-industrialized America with transformed power grids.<\/p>\n It was inspiring, but it was not an answer about whether people in Lordstown and Abilene are going to watch their utility bills spike while OpenAI generates videos of The Notorious B.I.G. It\u2019s very worth noting that video generation is the most energy-intensive AI<\/a> out there.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also a human cost, one made clearer the day before our interview, when Zelda Williams logged onto Instagram to beg strangers to stop sending her AI-generated videos of her late father, Robin Williams. \u201cYou\u2019re not making art<\/a>,\u201d she wrote. \u201cYou\u2019re making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings.\u201d<\/p>\n When I asked about how the company reconciles this kind of intimate harm with its mission, Lehane answered by talking about processes, including responsible design, testing frameworks, and government partnerships. \u201cThere is no playbook for this stuff, right?\u201d<\/p>\n Lehane showed vulnerability in some moments, saying he recognizes the \u201cenormous responsibilities that come with\u201d all that OpenAI does.<\/p>\n Whether or not those moments were designed for the audience, I believe him. Indeed, I left Toronto thinking I\u2019d watched a master class in political messaging \u2013 Lehane threading an impossible needle while dodging questions about company decisions that, for all I know, he doesn\u2019t even agree with. Then news broke that complicated that already complicated picture.<\/p>\n Nathan Calvin, a lawyer who works on AI policy at a nonprofit advocacy organization, Encode AI, revealed that at the same time I was talking with Lehane in Toronto, OpenAI had sent a sheriff\u2019s deputy to Calvin\u2019s house<\/a> in Washington, D.C., during dinner to serve him a subpoena. They wanted his private messages with California legislators, college students, and former OpenAI employees.<\/p>\n Calvin says the move was part of OpenAI\u2019s intimidation tactics around a new piece of AI regulation, California\u2019s SB 53. He says the company weaponized its ongoing legal battle with Elon Musk as a pretext to target critics, implying Encode was secretly funded by Musk. Calvin added that he fought OpenAI\u2019s opposition to California\u2019s SB 53, an AI safety bill, and that when he saw OpenAI claim that it \u201cworked to improve the bill,\u201d he \u201cliterally laughed out loud.\u201d In a social media skein, he went on to call Lehane, specifically, the \u201cmaster of the political dark arts.\u201d<\/p>\n In Washington, that might be a compliment. At a company like OpenAI whose mission is \u201cto build AI that benefits all of humanity,\u201d it sounds like an indictment.<\/p>\n But what matters much more is that even OpenAI\u2019s own people are conflicted about what they are becoming.<\/p>\n As my colleague Max reported last week<\/a>, a number of current and former employees took to social media after Sora 2 was released, expressing their misgivings. Among them was Boaz Barak, an OpenAI researcher and Harvard professor, who wrote about Sora 2<\/a> that it is \u201ctechnically amazing but it\u2019s premature to congratulate ourselves on avoiding the pitfalls of other social media apps and deepfakes.\u201d<\/p>\n On Friday, Josh Achiam \u2013 OpenAI\u2019s head of mission alignment \u2013 tweeted something even more remarkable about Calvin\u2019s accusation. Prefacing his comments by saying they were \u201cpossibly a risk to my whole career,\u201d Achiam went on to write of OpenAI: \u201cWe can\u2019t be doing things that make us into a frightening power instead 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.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth pausing to think about that. An OpenAI executive publicly questioning whether his company is becoming \u201ca frightening power instead of a virtuous one,\u201d isn\u2019t on a par with a competitor taking shots or a reporter asking questions. This is someone who chose to work at OpenAI, who believes in its mission, and who is now acknowledging a crisis of conscience despite the professional risk.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a crystallizing moment, one whose contradictions may only intensify as OpenAI races toward artificial general intelligence. It also has me thinking that the real question isn\u2019t whether Chris Lehane can sell OpenAI\u2019s mission. It\u2019s whether others \u2013 including, critically, the other people who work there \u2013 still believe it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chris Lehane is one of the best in the business at making bad news disappear. 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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n