The Prompt: Insights from OpenAI Global Affairs

Chris Lehane: Resilience is a Safety Strategy

The more people who can access AI, the better society can navigate the changes it will bring

Jun 18, 2026

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Welcome (back) to The Prompt. AI isn’t well understood, but we learn a lot in our work that can help. In this newsletter, we share some of these learnings with you. If you find them helpful, make sure you’re signed up for the next issue.

This edition of The Prompt is another personal essay from OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane (first essay here) based on his discussions at this week’s G7 meeting.

[Policy] Resilience is a safety strategy

The debate over AI is being framed as a choice between speed and caution: move fast to unlock enormous benefits, or slow down to minimize risks.

That framing misses a fundamental point: that one of the most important safety strategies is resilience.

As AI systems become more capable, the question is not whether people will have to adapt. They will. The real question is whether they have the opportunity to adapt alongside the technology itself, making their own judgments based on direct experience using the tools.

This is where democracies have an advantage. Democracy can be messy, but it distributes agency. It gives people the power to shape change, not just be affected by it. Broad participation is not a byproduct of resilience – it’s how resilience is built.

That’s why resilience is increasingly central to OpenAI’s approach to AI. For years, discussions about AI safety have focused primarily on technical safeguards: evaluations, red-teaming, testing, and risk mitigation. These measures remain essential. Powerful systems must be rigorously evaluated, deployed responsibly, governed thoughtfully.

But safety is a societal challenge, not just a technical one. Resilience is how societies navigate profound change: through exposure, trial, learning, and adaptation. Sam Altman believes that advanced AI should be introduced iteratively so that society and technology can advance together. As he recently wrote, one reason why OpenAI launches products “early and often” is to give “society and the technology time to co-evolve.”

This isn’t just a product philosophy. The more people who can access AI tools to more fully understand the benefits as well as the challenges, the more opportunities society has to build the muscles needed to navigate the profound changes AI will bring:

• Workers can learn which tasks AI enhances and which still require uniquely human judgment.
• Teachers can assess how students can use AI productively while preserving critical thinking.
• Parents can develop norms around healthy use.
• Businesses can redesign workflows.
• Governments can identify gaps in existing policies.
• Researchers can uncover risks and develop mitigations.

None of this learning happens in the abstract – it happens through use. The emergence of the automobile illustrates the point. Cars reshaped commerce, mobility, and daily life long before society settled on the rules that govern them today. We developed those rules through experience: creating driver’s licenses and speed limits, redesigning roads and intersections, introducing seat belts and insurance requirements, and continuously improving safety as both cars and society evolved.

History offers few examples of societies building resilience by sheltering from transformative technologies until every question has been answered, but it does offer notable examples to the contrary. Imperial China adopted printing centuries before 15th-century Europe, but its strong, centralized state deployed printing to standardize Confucian texts and promote officially sanctioned knowledge. Whereas Europe’s messy, perhaps, but ultimately agency-distributing system of competing states, churches and cities enabled the spread of ideas, making the printing press a linchpin of religious upheaval, scientific exchange, and political change.

AI demands a similar capacity for adaptation.

This doesn’t mean recklessness. OpenAI has long argued that the most capable systems require increasing levels of evaluation, safeguards, and oversight. The frontier of AI development demands serious attention to risks of misuse and catastrophic scenarios.

But another danger deserves equal attention: brittleness. A society in which only a handful of companies and institutions understand advanced AI is a brittle society. In particular, democracies that outsource their collective judgment about transformative technologies to a few private actors become brittle democracies.

Our collective experience with social media is a cautionary example. A few private companies came to shape the information environments in which democratic societies operate. Governments and institutions struggled to keep up, and societies found themselves debating the rules only after the technologies had already transformed civic life.

As frontier systems become more capable, every AI lab will make consequential decisions about deployment, safeguards, acceptable uses, and risk tolerance. Those decisions will matter enormously – but they will be private judgments.

The issue is not whether particular companies are acting in good faith. Most are. The question is whether the future of a foundational technology should depend so much on the worldview of any one company.

America is celebrating 250 years of independence based on the profound belief that democracy is the best way to deliver on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The genius of our operating system for realizing these values into concrete realities, the US Constitution, is based on translating competing interests into public frameworks through institutions, standards, independent evaluation, accountability, and public trust. Not because companies or their leaders lack principles, but because no single company’s principles or individual leader’s beliefs should determine how transformative technologies reshape society. Public policy, not private policy.

The result may seem counterintuitive: broad access to AI can itself enhance safety. The more freely accessible these technologies are, within appropriate baseline guardrails, the more people gain firsthand experience with their capabilities and limitations. The more people and institutions incorporate them into daily life, the better they become at identifying risks, developing norms, correcting mistakes, and adapting to change.

In other words, widespread use does not merely distribute benefits – it distributes preparedness, and it distributes agency.

The alternative is a world in which advanced AI is only deeply understood by a narrow set of experts and executives while everyone else faces its consequences after decisions have already been made. That may reduce exposure in the near term, but risks leaving societies less capable of governing the technology over the long term.

OpenAI’s position reflects deeper confidence in people. Recent experience suggests that people adapt more effectively than we often expect. Predictions of AI-driven, immediate labor-market collapse have not materialized in the ways many predicted. Instead, people have experimented, learned new tools, created new businesses, redesigned jobs, and discovered entirely new uses for these systems.

The lesson isn’t that disruption will be painless – significant transitions still lie ahead – but that human agency matters. The future should preserve meaningful human involvement: people exercising judgment, setting goals, applying values, and deciding what’s worth pursuing.

That’s why resilience belongs alongside innovation and safety as a defining principle of the Intelligence Age. The societies that thrive during periods of technological transformation are neither those that halt change nor those that embrace it blindly. They are the ones that trust people and build institutions to learn and adapt as quickly as the world around them changes.

[Disclosure]

Graphics created by Base Three using ChatGPT.