Helen Toner
Director of Strategy at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology; former OpenAI board member (2021-2023)
CSET, Georgetown University
Policy and government
Toner was on the OpenAI board that briefly fired Sam Altman in 2023 and has since become a leading policy voice arguing that self-regulation by AI companies fails 'when money is on the line'. She pushes for transparency rules and whistleblower protections rather than either a pause or laissez-faire.
Declines to give a number
No number. Testified that "my experience on the board of OpenAI taught me how fragile internal guardrails are when money is on the line, and why it's imperative that policymakers step in." (Senate Judiciary subcommittee, September 17, 2024)Source
On timing
AGI is something "many people inside those companies think they might reach in 10 or 20 years, and some believe could be as close as one to three years away" (September 2024).
SourceWhat they call for
- Transparency requirements for developers of high stakes AI
- Whistleblower protections for AI employees
- Government technical capacity to evaluate models
- No 'wait and see' approach to policy
In their own words
"a wait and see approach to policy is not an option"; calls for "transparency requirements for developers of high stakes AI systems" and "bolstering whistleblower protections for employees of AI companies."
17 September 2024
TED2024: "when it comes to how they work on the inside, there are serious limits to how much we know" and "if we want to figure out whether an AI can do something concerning, like hack critical infrastructure or persuade someone to change their political beliefs, our methods of measuring that are rudimentary."
15 May 2024