Helen Toner says she would vote to remove Sam Altman as OpenAI CEO again

Helen Toner, one of the four OpenAI board members who voted to fire Sam Altman in November 2023, says she would make the same decision again. Asked on The Verge's Decoder podcast whether she would do it the same way if she had to relive the board vote, Toner said: "Oh, for sure. I mean, we went into it knowing that it was going to suck." Altman returned as chief executive within days, and Toner resigned from the board.

Asked whether Altman is trustworthy, Toner, now executive director of Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, said her "stance on that is pretty clear," adding that "if our hopes for the future are pinned on any one individual being trustworthy, then we're pretty screwed." In hindsight, she said, the board should have built stronger relationships with executives at the company.

With OpenAI and Anthropic heading toward public markets, Toner said it will be "really interesting to see if going public is good or bad for their governance." Public companies face much more structured and regulated governance and external scrutiny, she said, and an independent board committee has "a pretty strong legal meaning" at a public company.