Helen Toner, a former OpenAI director who voted to fire Sam Altman in 2023, said in a Decoder interview published Saturday that AI safety plans cannot rest on trusting any one person, according to The Verge¹.

Toner now runs Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, a roughly 50-person policy analysis group founded in 2019 that briefs Congress and executive-branch agencies, she told host Nilay Patel¹.

Patel said OpenAI’s nonprofit board was meant to keep the company from putting profit ahead of its safety mission, and that after the directors voted Altman out, Altman returned as chief executive, Toner resigned, and the company later restructured¹.

Toner told Patel, “if our hopes for the future are pinned on any one individual being trustworthy, then we’re pretty screwed”¹.

The Verge’s introduction said frontier-lab chief executives have called for a slowdown and asked Washington for help, and that a White House voluntary accord relies in part on board accountability of the kind that failed at OpenAI¹.

Toner said OpenAI, founded in 2015, and Anthropic, founded in 2021, were not set up as consumer internet companies, and that leading researchers there still aim to build machines as smart as or smarter than people, including through recursive self-improvement toward superintelligence¹.

She said policymakers in Washington have more interest and more staff expertise on AI than outsiders often assume, but that whether U.S. institutions can pass significant rules remains an open question¹.

The Verge said the interview was recorded before Nvidia opened an investigation that later led Jensen Huang to resign, and that the conversation did not address that episode directly¹.

The published piece is an interview; OpenAI, Altman, and other lab executives were not quoted in response in the account reviewed¹.