Helen Toner is an Australian AI-policy researcher and executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). She was a member of OpenAI’s nonprofit board from 2021 to 2023, including at the time the board voted to remove Sam Altman as chief executive in November 2023. She has testified before several congressional committees on AI and national security.
Case
Jon Ossoff urges inspections, legislation and an AI treaty; Donald Trump says existing federal powers are sufficient. Their opposing positions raise a concrete question: should Washington add safeguards for frontier AI?
Role at the time: Executive director of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former OpenAI board member, interviewed on Offline with Jon Favreau
Statement summary
Asked what federal AI legislation should prioritize, Helen Toner said companies should face federal disclosure requirements covering what they are training, what tests they run, and their security practices, along with independent third-party auditors and a government entity empowered to investigate and demand information after incidents. She said “more useful than a kill switch” would be general “emergency intervention powers” letting government act in an emergency, and that regulation should also cover frontier labs’ internal development practices, not only the products they release.
“I think what we should be doing now is setting ourselves up to be able to navigate that better. So what does that mean? It means… anything around more transparency from the company, so disclosure requirements… federal requirements around sharing what kind of AIs they’re training, what kind of tests they’re running, why they think what they’re doing is safe, what their security practices are… I do think the third-party auditors is an important element… Would love to see better kind of incident reporting but also investigations… you could have kind of a … government entity that is able to actually go in … demand information. I think that is where I would start.” … “I actually think more useful than a kill switch is kind of emergency intervention powers of different kinds… giving… government the ability to intervene in the case of an emergency… could be helpful. I think having clearer standards on what is okay development practices here.” … “We also need to have kind of these regulatory frameworks… looking internally at their development practices as well.”
The case’s fixed reference point is whether Washington should impose stronger safeguards on frontier AI. Toner proposes several specific new federal requirements — disclosure rules, third-party audits, incident-investigation powers, emergency-intervention authority and oversight of internal development practices — which supports the proposition. The closest competing label is mixed_or_conditional, because she is skeptical of a literal “kill switch” as one specific proposal; it loses because she reframes rather than rejects that idea, proposing broader emergency-intervention powers in its place, and every other element of her answer adds to rather than qualifies the case for stronger safeguards.
Statement dates: September 19, 2026
Statement dates: September 19, 2026
