The US administration’s targeting of academic research and international students is a “great gift” to China in the race to compete on artificial intelligence, former OpenAI board member Helen Toner has said.
The director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) joined the board of OpenAI in 2021 after a career studying AI and the relationship between the United States and China.
Toner, a 33-year-old University of Melbourne graduate, was on the board for two years until a falling out with founder Sam Altman in 2023. Altman was fired by the board over claims he was not “consistently candid” in his communications and the board did not have confidence in Altman’s ability to lead.
The chaotic months that followed saw Altman fired and then re-hired with three members of the board, including Toner, ousted instead. They will soon also be the subject of a planned film, with the director of Challengers and Call Me By Your Name, Luca Guadagnino, reportedly in talks to direct.
The saga, according to Time magazine – which named her one of the top 100 most influential people on AI in 2024 – resulted in the Australian having “the ear of policymakers around the world trying to regulate AI”.
At CSET, Toner has a team of 60 people working on AI research for white papers or briefing policymakers focused on the use of AI in the military, workforce, biosecurity and cybersecurity sectors.
“A lot of my work focuses on some combination of AI, safety and security issues, the Chinese AI ecosystem and also what gets called frontier AI,” Toner said.
Toner said the United States is concerned about losing the AI race to China and while US chip export controls make it harder for China to get compute power to compete with the US, the country was still making a “serious push” on AI, as highlighted by the surprise success of Chinese generative AI model DeepSeek earlier this year.
The Trump administration’s attacks on research and bans on international students are a “gift” to China in the AI race with the US, Toner said.
“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,” she said.
“That is a big … boon to China in terms of competing with the US.”
The AI boom has led to claims and concerns about a job wipeout caused by companies using AI to replace work that had otherwise been done by humans. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, the company behind the generative AI model Claude, told Axios last week that AI could reduce entry-level white-collar jobs by 50% and result in 20% unemployment in the next five years.
Toner said Amodei “often says things that seem directionally right to me, but in terms of … timeline and numbers often seem quite aggressive” but added that disruption in the jobs market had already started to show.
“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.”
Experts have suggested companies that invested heavily in AI are now being pressed to show the results of that investment. Toner said while the real-world use of AI can generate a lot of value, it is less clear what business models and which players will benefit from that value.
Dominant uses might be a mix of different AI services plugged into existing applications – such as phone keyboards that can now transcribe voices – as well as stand-alone chatbots, but it’s “up in the air” which type of AI would actually dominate, she said.
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Turner said the push for profitability was less risky than the overall race to be first in AI advancements.
“It means that these companies are all making it up as they go along and figuring out as they go how to make trade-offs between getting products out the door, doing extra testing, putting in extra guardrails, putting in measures that are supposed to make the model more safe but also make it more annoying to use,” she said.
“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 said she was worried about the idea of “gradual disempowerment to AI” – “meaning a world where we just gradually hand over more control over different parts of society and the economy and government to AI systems, and then realise a bit too late that it’s not going the way that we wanted, but we can’t really turn back”.
She is most optimistic about AI’s use in improving science and drug discovery and for self-driving services like Waymo in reducing fatalities on the roads.
“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 that her friends had been sending her options on who might play her in the film.
“Any of the names that friends of mine have thrown my way are all these incredibly beautiful actresses,” she said. “So I’ll take any of those, whoever they choose.”
