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At the June 5, 2024 Axios AI+ Summit, former OpenAI board member Helen Toner warned that discussion of AI risk can become too narrowly focused on a science-fiction image of robots attacking people. She said AI could take society in “a lot of other ways” in a bad direction, and that treating one specific story as the whole problem does a disservice to public understanding.
What Helen Toner said about AI risk
Axios journalist Ina Fried interviewed Toner at the summit. At the time, Toner was a former OpenAI board member and director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). Axios reported that she had joined OpenAI’s board in 2021 and participated in Sam Altman’s November 2023 firing; Futurism later reported that she resigned from the board. These are historical roles, not descriptions of her current positions.
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Toner said: “I just think sometimes people hear the phrase ‘existential risk’ and they just think Skynet, and robots shooting humans.” She continued: “There’s a lot of other ways that AI could really take things in a bad direction, and we do ourselves a disservice by locking in these very specific stories.” Axios, June 5, 2024; Futurism, June 10, 2024.
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Her point was about the limits of a narrow mental picture, not a prediction that a particular catastrophe will happen. Axios described her broader argument as a call to think holistically about potential civilization-scale bad outcomes in the coming decades. The interview coverage does not give a probability or a quantitative forecast.
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Why she connected risk to public understanding
Toner also described the technology as powerful and difficult for the public to understand: “This is a very powerful technology. We don’t know how it works. Right now it’s being developed and pushed forward by a very small group of people.” She urged people “not to think of this as a distant mysterious magical technology that you could never possibly have a view on.” Axios, June 5, 2024.
Those remarks put two issues together: generative AI systems can be opaque to people using them, while consequential development decisions are made by a relatively small group. Toner’s appeal was not that every person must become a technical expert. It was that people should not treat AI’s direction as unknowable or beyond public judgment.
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What broader AI risks mean in practice
The summit remarks do not provide a checklist of specific harms, and it would be misleading to attribute one to Toner. A related CSET report offers useful policy context, however, by examining how states may signal intentions and reduce the chance of misperception or escalation as AI capabilities develop.
In its October 2023 report Decoding Intentions: Artificial Intelligence and Costly Signals, Andrew Imbrie, Owen Daniels, and Helen Toner describe “costly signals” as commitments that would impose political, reputational, or monetary costs if the sender backed down. Examples in the report include public commitments to test and evaluate systems, licensing and registration, sustained verification, and investments in interpretability. These are governance mechanisms discussed in the report, not hazards Toner listed in the 2024 interview. CSET report, October 2023.
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The report also identifies tradeoffs. More transparency can help make commitments credible, but may conflict with privacy or security. Verification can support confidence over time, yet it requires sustained effort. The policy relevance is that reducing risk involves choices about credibility, oversight, and information-sharing—not only imagining whether a machine might directly harm a person.
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“Bad things AI can do besides kill you” is a headline framing, not a verified direct quotation from Toner. The wording Axios attributes to her is that AI could take things “in a bad direction” in multiple ways. Her warning broadens the conversation beyond extinction imagery; it does not establish that any named scenario is inevitable or that she supplied a definitive ranking of risks.
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