Helen Toner, one of the four OpenAI board members who voted to remove Sam Altman as chief executive in November 2023, told The Verge’s Decoder podcast that she would vote the same way again. The interview was published on 14 November 2026, 1,093 days after the 17 November 2023 vote, by our arithmetic.
Asked by editor-in-chief Nilay Patel 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 was reinstated within days in 2023.
Business Pill · Concentration Explained
An evergreen Business Engineer explainer on concentration, the general idea behind an organisation that depends on a small group of people. It teaches the concept only and does not discuss OpenAI or this interview.
The key insight: As we read the interview, Toner’s answer on the vote is unchanged three years on, and her argument has shifted from one chief executive to structures: she said the future should not rest on “any one individual being trustworthy”.
Asked whether Altman is trustworthy, Toner said: “I think my stance on that is pretty clear, and I also think that if our hopes for the future are pinned on any one individual being trustworthy, then we’re pretty screwed.” She added: “That’s why I do the work that I do, because I think we need to have different structures and many more people involved with many more perspectives being represented.”
Asked what she would have done differently, Toner said: “For sure a thing would have been building stronger relationships with executives on the team.” She said a fuller answer would mean “unpicking all this stuff and all these legal restrictions”.
Toner is now executive director of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University. The Verge says the conversation was recorded before Nvidia opened its investigation into its chief executive, so the two did not discuss it. Our explainer on OpenAI’s structure and board sets out who governs the company today.
Days from the OpenAI board’s 17 November 2023 vote to remove Sam Altman to Helen Toner’s Decoder interview, published on 14 November 2026. Day counts are our arithmetic.
What Toner Said About the Labs and Washington
Toner contrasted what lab leaders say in public with what their policy staff tell officials. “A fun dynamic, or a very irritating dynamic sitting in DC, is that all these companies, including the very AGI-pilled ones, have these lobbying arms, these government affairs arms, that are so not AGI-pilled,” she said. In closed-door roundtables, she said, “it’s like night and day. They’re very much in the B2B SaaSmindset.”
She said the leading labs openly describe a plan to “figure out how to do recursive self-improvement (RSI) and then we’re going to do that until we have superintelligence that is AI that vastly outstrips humans.” She said that view is “taken for granted in a lot of circles at this point”.
Raising Anthropic’s planned listing, Patel said: “there will be market forces acting on them in a totally new way”. Our guide to how the Anthropic IPO works covers the pricing and listing timetable, and our report on OpenAI’s safety leadership departures tracks earlier governance changes.
The Structural Read
As we read her Washington remarks, Toner described a gap between what lab leaders say publicly about recursive self-improvement and superintelligence and how their government affairs staff present the companies to officials, which she called “the B2B SaaSmindset”.
As we read the timing, the interview was recorded before Nvidia opened its investigation into its chief executive, according to The Verge, so her comments on leadership and boards were not a response to that case.
Helen Toner on The Verge’s Decoder, 14 November 2026
“Oh, for sure. I mean, we went into it knowing that it was going to suck.”
Three Implications
FOR OPENAI We found no OpenAI comment on the interview as of 20:00 UTC; Toner’s remarks do not change its board or structure.
FOR AI GOVERNANCE Toner said the answer is “different structures and many more people involved with many more perspectives being represented”.
FOR WASHINGTON Toner said lab government affairs staff present the companies in “the B2B SaaSmindset”, in contrast with their executives’ public statements.
The framework describes the AI Supercycle as having “a layered industrial stack of nine layers, running from energy at the bedrock to governance at the ceiling”.
As we read it, a former director arguing for board structures over trust in one person speaks to the governance layer at the top of that stack. The framework does not discuss OpenAI’s board or Toner.
What Is Not Established
Toner’s comments are her own view of events in which she took part, and they do not change OpenAI’s board or structure. She declined to give a full account of the 2023 decisions, citing legal restrictions. We found no OpenAI comment on the interview as of 20:00 UTC, and OpenAI was not contacted for this piece.
This Week In The AI Supercycle
AI Lost Its Central Banker, the Lab Oligopoly, and the Future of Open Source
This week’s issue: the Nvidia leadership change, read as the AI build-out losing its central banker: who now finances the GPU landlords, backstops the data centres and sponsors open models, and why two labs are becoming the bank.
Helen Toner said on The Verge’s Decoder that she would vote to remove Sam Altman again, 1,093 days after the 2023 vote, and that relying on any one individual being trustworthy would leave the world “pretty screwed”. She also said the leading labs’ government affairs staff present them to officials in a “B2B SaaSmindset”.
A note on sourcing. Quotations come from The Verge’s Decoder transcript of Nilay Patel’s interview with Helen Toner, published on 14 November 2026. The date of the 2023 board vote is public record; day counts are our arithmetic. OpenAI was not contacted for this piece.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
