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OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman, still shaking off a pair of terrifying attacks on his home in as many weeks, struck a notably softer note during a recent podcast appearance. “There’s a fear with A.I.,” he acknowledged. “Let’s say it makes all this money and does all the work and whatever. Like, what do I do? What’s my kid going to do?” Greg Brockman, the company’s president, jumped in with a similar observation. Most people outside of Silicon Valley don’t understand how they’re going to benefit from A.I., he said. “And I think that’s something that we’re increasingly realizing that we also have to really spell out.”

The industry’s P.R. crisis is, in many ways, a problem of its own creation. For years, Altman and his contemporaries have been warning that the dawn of superintelligence could be an eschatological event with the potential to leave billions jobless—a message that helped A.I. companies raise ungodly sums of capital from investors hoping to squeeze on to the last train leaving the station. Not surprisingly, it’s been less popular with the general public. Poll after poll shows deepening distrust toward the industry, leading to local protests and growing political pushback in Washington.

Now, it appears that OpenAI is trying to sound a little more… human. Earlier this month, the company’s government affairs team rolled out a new policy document, highlighting 20 ideas for “keeping A.I. people-first.” Among the proposals are tax reforms to fund public-safety-net programs, a four-day workweek, and the creation of a public wealth fund to give everyone “a stake in A.I.-driven economic growth.” It’s a markedly different tone than some of OpenAI’s other policy proposals, which focused on playing up America’s technological arms race with China to justify a light-touch regulatory regime.

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Chris Lehane, the ubiquitous political operative and image architect who now heads up global affairs at OpenAI, acknowledged that the company has been working through some of these tensions. “Thus far, the conversation on the social value proposition of A.I. has been overly binary,” he told me. “We don’t think we should just be scaring people,” he added. “We also don’t think we should be telling people that there’s nothing to worry about.”

To that end, this week Altman published a new set of five principles that will guide OpenAI’s work: “democratizing” technological power, “empowering everyone to achieve their goals,” etcetera. Altman painted a picture of a future with “widespread flourishing at a level that is currently difficult to imagine.” None of these new principles will lead OpenAI to stop ramping up its lobbying efforts or staunchly opposing most attempts to regulate the industry. But, Altman wrote, the company is “committed to doing our part to make the future better than the past.” Phew?

Naturally, Lehane dismissed the idea that OpenAI is pivoting its messaging, per se, arguing that it’s simply “the moment” that has changed—that the public is now more receptive to the types of policy proposals that the company is offering. “And no one really has offered them out there yet, and we see a huge opportunity to actually help lead that conversation.”

I asked Lehane whether he felt any urgency to publicize OpenAI’s new messaging before the politics of A.I. begin to harden—a premise that he politely disputed. “Our urgency is that the nature of the technology itself is going to require transformative policy solutions to optimize for its benefits,” he insisted.

That may be wishful thinking. In 2025, polling from the Pew Research Center found that “near identical” shares of Republicans and Democrats were more concerned than excited about A.I. Only 17 percent of U.S. adults expected A.I. to have a positive impact on the U.S. over the next two decades. Meanwhile, Quinnipiac found that a paltry 5 percent of Americans feel like the people developing A.I. actually represent their interests. Heavy cake.

Meanwhile, public anxiety seems like it’s reached a new and dangerous crescendo, with the attacks on Altman’s house and OpenAI’s headquarters, and an incident in Indianapolis where someone fired 13 shots at the front door of councilman Ron Gibson shortly after the city’s development commission approved a data center project in his district. A note bearing the message “No Data Centers” was left on Gibson’s bullet-riddled front step.

At times, industry luminaries have compounded the problem by publicly chin-stroking about the civilization-destroying possibilities of their technology. In 2014, Elon Musk referred to A.I. as one of humanity’s “biggest existential threat(s).” In 2015, Altman, perhaps partially in jest, said that “A.I. will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.” Most recently, Dario Amodei, the C.E.O. of Anthropic, put the chances of things going “really, really badly” at 25 percent. All three have suggested that A.I. could devastate the labor market, with Altman regularly calling for a universal basic income, Musk promising that work will soon be “optional,” and Amodei claiming that 50 percent of entry-level white collar jobs will be “disrupted” by 2030.

“I can’t remember another case like this, where the dominant negative narrative on A.I. and the economy is being driven by the C.E.O.s of the companies themselves. I’ve never seen this before,” Andy Hall, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, told me a few weeks ago. “I honestly have absolutely no idea what they think they’re accomplishing by going out publicly and constantly talking about how they’re going to put everyone out of work.”

Hall was being somewhat hyperbolic—it’s hardly a total mystery why Altman and Amodei have both pushed this sort of doomer rhetoric. “I get it,” tech investor Chamath Palihapitiya wrote in his 2025 annual letter, “Fundraising requires narrative, and we are building God is a better pitch than we wrote some very clever linear algebra, pirated the internet, and threw a bunch of compute at it.” The problem, Palihapitiya continued, is that A.I. “has to be trusted, because low public trust leads to lower adoption and worse regulations.”

Alas, the tech industry’s track record over the past several decades leaves much to be desired. “People will not trust them until their actions start aligning with what they’re saying,” said J.B. Branch, a policy counsel at Public Citizen. “Even these policy solutions that they’ve come up with—does anyone seriously believe that employers are going to cut the work week? Does anyone seriously believe that we are going to, within the United States, find a way to have universal basic income? These solutions are so devoid of realism that it doesn’t pass a sniff test. It’s just, Let’s say some stuff to appease people, but that’s not going to win anyone over.”

That may be true, but OpenAI, like Anthropic and xAI, does need to do something before public sentiment hardens against the industry. Washington, which is currently an ally, risks turning into an adversary if the most dire predictions about job losses come to pass. At that point, voters won’t be reading Altman’s blog. They’ll be surrounding data centers with pitchforks.

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