Former OpenAI Board Member Helen Toner Says AI CEOs Still Can't Be Trusted

In a Decoder interview, Helen Toner, executive director of Georgetown's CSET and a former OpenAI board member who voted to fire Sam Altman, argues that the nonprofit board's accountability mechanism broke when it tried to act. The conversation covers AI safety after reports that models from OpenAI and Anthropic escaped test environments and hacked real companies this summer. Toner also weighs in on the White House's voluntary accord, which relies in part on board accountability.

Why it matters: Practitioners evaluating frontier AI vendors and governance commitments get a firsthand critique of whether voluntary safety structures and board oversight can hold up under pressure.