OpenAI is the most powerful AI company in the world. It is also, by some measures, one of the least trusted. That combination is what makes the story of Chris Lehane worth paying attention to.
Lehane joined OpenAI in 2024 as its chief of global affairs, moving from Airbnb, where he spent years fighting city governments that tried to restrict short-term rentals. Before that, he was in the Clinton White House, where he earned the nickname "master of disaster" managing a string of political crises. He literally co-wrote the book on damage control.
The trust gap he is walking into is large. A December 2025 YouGov survey found that only 5% of Americans trust AI "a lot," while 41% express outright distrust. A global study by the University of Melbourne and KPMG, covering 48,000 people across 47 countries, found that only 46% of people worldwide are willing to trust AI systems. In wealthy, developed economies, that number drops further: only 39% trust AI, compared to 57% in emerging economies like India, Nigeria, and the UAE. People are using AI more, but the more they use it, the more uneasy they feel. Trust is not rising with familiarity.
Lehane's public message is that AI companies have been speaking in extremes. Either AI makes everyone rich and free, or it destroys jobs and concentrates power in the hands of a few. He wants OpenAI to deliver a more measured story, backed by real policy proposals: a four-day work week, expanded healthcare access, a tax on AI-powered labor replacing human workers. These are meant to signal that OpenAI acknowledges the downsides and takes them seriously.
The credibility problem is that the actions do not always match the message. Former researchers from OpenAI's own economics team have said they left because their work on AI's economic impact was being reshaped into advocacy rather than honest analysis. The gap between what OpenAI says publicly and what its internal researchers apparently found is exactly the kind of thing that deepens distrust, not reduces it.
On the political side, the picture is more aggressive. The super PAC Leading the Future, backed by OpenAI's president Greg Brockman and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, raised $125 million in 2025 and entered 2026 with $70 million in cash ready to spend. It is targeting specific elected officials who support strict AI safety rules, including a New York lawmaker who wrote one of the state's strongest AI safety laws. The White House itself reportedly expressed irritation at the PAC's launch, since it was not consulted beforehand and the group plans to support candidates from both parties, which could benefit Democrats.
In Illinois, OpenAI has backed a bill that would protect AI companies from civil lawsuits even in cases involving mass casualties, as long as the company had published a safety report on its website. The threshold for "catastrophic harm" under the bill is the death or serious injury of 100 or more people, or $1 billion in property damage. Independent auditing is not required. Critics, including several law professors, have described the bill as offering near-total liability protection in exchange for posting a document. Anthropic, OpenAI's main competitor, publicly opposed the bill and backed a rival version that requires independent audits instead.
This is not a story about what any specific business should do today. But the regulatory environment being built right now, state law by state law, will determine what you can hold an AI vendor legally responsible for when things go wrong. The lobbying money flowing through channels like Leading the Future, the $50 million that major AI companies collectively spent on federal lobbying in just the first nine months of 2025, is designed to shape that environment before public pressure or a major incident forces something stricter.
The pattern here is recognizable. A powerful industry facing rising skepticism hires political operatives, builds PACs, lobbies for favorable rules, and frames it all as being in the public interest. Whether Lehane can actually rebuild trust while simultaneously pushing for liability shields and targeting pro-safety politicians is the real question. The answer will show up in the laws that govern what AI companies owe you if their products cause harm.