Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner calls US targeting of academia “a gift” to China in AI race
Helen Toner, ex-OpenAI board strategist and director at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, slams US government actions hitting academic research and international students. She says these moves hand China a major advantage in AI competition.
Toner joined OpenAI’s board in 2021 but was ousted in 2023 amid a board shakeup that saw founder Sam Altman fired and then reinstated. Toner and two other board members were removed instead. Now, their story is reportedly heading to the big screen with Luca Guadagnino potentially directing. 
Toner, named by Time as one of 2024’s top AI influencers, leads a 60-person team at CSET researching AI’s impact on security, workforce, and biosecurity.
She pointed to US chip export controls slowing China’s AI compute power but said Beijing is still pushing hard. She flagged the Trump-era bans on international students, mostly immigrants from China, as a major misstep:
“Certainly it’s a great gift to [China] the way that the US is currently attacking scientific research, and foreign talent – which is a huge proportion of the USA workforce – is immigrants, many of them coming from China,” Toner said.
“That is a big … boon to China in terms of competing with the US.”
On AI and jobs, Toner finds Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei’s predictions aggressive but acknowledges early signs of disruption in white-collar work:
“The kind of things that [language model-based AI] can do best at the moment … if you can give them a bite-size task – not a really long term project, but something that you might not need ages and ages to do and something where you still need human review,” she said.
“That’s a lot of the sort of work that you give to interns or new grads in white-collar industries.”
She says AI companies are rushing products out under pressure, balancing release speed with safety measures and usability:
“They’re figuring that all out on the fly, and … they’re making those decisions while under pressure to go as fast as they can.”
Toner warns of a “gradual disempowerment to AI,” where society cedes control bit by bit and regrets it too late.
She’s most hopeful about AI improving science, drug discovery, and self-driving tech saving lives:
“With AI, you never want to be looking for making the AI perfect, you want it to be better than the alternative. And when it comes to cars, the alternative is thousands of people dying per year.
“If you can improve on that, that’s amazing. You’re saving many, many people.”
Toner joked about who might play her in the upcoming film, saying she’ll take any of the “incredibly beautiful actresses” friends suggested.
Related: English-speaking countries more nervous about rise of AI, polls suggest
