What I'm Reading - 6/1/25
Five questions for OpenAI about why their government affairs team started a Substack
Hello from Las Vegas! I’m writing this before heading to the airport to get back to DC. My friend Beth and I were here to see Kenny Chesney at the sphere. It was one of the coolest concert experiences I’ve ever had. Definitely worth checking off the bucket list. Here’s the opening montage, which felt like being immersed in a Disney movie.
Today, we also have five questions from the team at OpenAI. When their global affairs team launched on Substack a few weeks ago, I was intrigued - mostly by their choice of Substack over the many other mediums they already use to distribute content. Now, other companies also do this, such as Meta, which has employees post content on Medium. To gain a better understanding, I asked them if they’d answer some questions about it. I asked them. This is not a paid sponsorship or anything. I just thought it would be interesting.
1. You could have shared this type of content through a number of different channels. Why Substack?
Admittedly, we didn’t look around – we’re former journalists and we have friends and former colleagues who use Substack effectively, so we took that as an unspoken endorsement, and the functionality works great for our purposes.
2. What primary goals or outcomes are you hoping to achieve with this newsletter?
One goal we definitely don’t have, is competing with the already plentiful coverage of AI. Even when we worked in news, we covered politics, not tech.
What we can do well is, first, provide some political context for AI as it develops. That’s something that a team under our head of Global Affairs Chris Lehane knows how to do. A technology platform intersects with so many issues – not just the issues it’s meant to solve for, not just the issues for which it gets regulated, but all the issues that come up because half a billion people are using our tools in myriad ways every week.
We also can provide some context for our own news. OpenAI practices iterative deployment – getting our technology to people quickly as it advances, so people can adapt and learn to use it while it’s still early days. But that means we have a role to play in helping people understand AI’s acceleration and where we are in the arc of its development.
And our hope is that between the two, we can give people in DC some insight they don’t already know or can’t find elsewhere, that helps them make sense of AI for themselves, for their bosses, or for their constituents.
3. What specific types of content or topics should readers expect to see covered most frequently?
We do a lot of polling about AI and intersecting issues. We’ll offer political context for AI generally as it advances, and policy context for our product news. There’s never been a technology that’s simultaneously a strategic national imperative and arguably the fastest-scaling consumer product ever. On the one hand, maintaining US leadership on AI is all-important in the face of a fast-oncoming China, and around half of US adults have used AI at some point – but almost half of Americans still haven’t, and many are understandably nervous about it, daunted by it, or just don’t think it’s relevant for them. Elected representatives will face questions and expectations from their constituents and as I mentioned earlier, it’s on us to help with answers.
4. How will your Substack complement or differ from your existing communications channels (such as your official blog or social media accounts)?
Our blog has our latest official policy news and content. We use LinkedIn as a real-time outlet. Through the OpenAI Forum, we offer incredible talks by experts in a range of fields – science, education, health, sports, the arts – on how they’re using AI in their work today. A regular publication that serves as a cheat sheet for the best insights from all of the above, along with bespoke content, seemed worth trying.
5. Who is the target audience for the newsletter, and how do you hope it influences public or policy conversations around AI?
We hope this will be useful for people working in and around AI policymaking – but also for anyone who’s interested in the unfolding story of AI. I say “around AI policymaking” because AI is like electricity – it’s going to change daily life and the physical landscape of the US, which means that it eventually will intersect with just about everything. The hoped-for result is that those involved in the policymaking, and interested AI users and observers, feel they have more context for what’s happening with it as it advances.
Have a great Sunday!
What I’m Reading
Must Read
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The AI Leadership Compass: From Automation to Anxiety: What’s Missing in the Reimagining
Stories About Specific Countries
Political & Social Commentary
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NPR: Meta plans to replace humans with AI to assess privacy and societal risks
Meta Transparency Center: Integrity Reports, First Quarter 2025
GW Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics: The Case for Transparency - How social media platform data access leads to real-world change
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Getting Out of Control: How to Prevent Woke AI - Part Two
Getting Out of Control: How to Prevent Woke AI - Part Three
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