For the past eight months, OpenAI has been unable to find a public relations director who can keep CEO Sam Altman in check. Since Hannah Wong left in December, the hiring process has been a parade of rejections. Now, with political and public pressure mounting, major investor Thrive Capital has parachuted in its own PR partner, Kelly Sims, to clean up the mess under chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane.
Multiple candidates have flat-out said Altman’s habit of speaking off-the-cuff and setting his own PR agenda leaves the role with almost no control. That’s the core reason top talent has turned down the job. OpenAI has approached Uber executive Jill Hazelbaker, Jony Ive’s PR chief Sarah O’Brien, and former Square PR head Aaron Zamost — all said no. The gaffes keep coming: Altman recently declared he can’t imagine raising a baby without AI, and when pressed about AI’s energy consumption driving up electricity bills, he argued that training humans takes energy too. That didn’t go over well.
Beyond scrambling to contain Altman’s foot-in-mouth moments, OpenAI’s proactive PR moves have felt clumsy and out of touch. In April, the company spent hundreds of millions to acquire tech podcast TBPN, hoping to reclaim the narrative — but the show’s audience is mostly Silicon Valley insiders. Critics called it an echo chamber, failing to reach the general public and regulators who actually matter.
Yet for all its public relations ineptitude, OpenAI turns into a hungry wolf when poaching developers. While rival Anthropic struggles with compute shortages, OpenAI has been aggressively resetting usage limits on its Codex programming tool and offering free trials. Altman himself has been handing out $2 million worth of model credits to Y Combinator startups in exchange for equity, in a relentless bid to lock in developers.