[7][9] In May 2017, Toner recommended a grant of $1.5 million by Open Philanthropy to the UCLA School of Law to "support a fellowship, research, and meetings on governance and policy issues related to advanced artificial intelligence.
[5][14][15] An October 2023 paper Artificial Intelligence and Costly Signals co-authored with Andrew Imbrie and Owen J. Daniels was reportedly a source of tension between Toner and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over its inclusion of criticism about the launch of ChatGPT.
[7] Altman reportedly complained that the paper criticised OpenAI's efforts to keep its technology safe while praising the approach taken by rival company Anthropic.
Altman reportedly called Toner and said that her paper "could cause problems" due to the Federal Trade Commission's investigation into OpenAI's data collection.
[17] In October 2023 she published the report "Decoding Intentions: Artificial Intelligence and Costly Signals" with two co-authors, writing[18] OpenAI has also drawn criticism for many other safety and ethics issues related to the launches of ChatGPT and GPT-4, including regarding copyright issues, labor conditions for data annotators, and the susceptibility of their products to “jailbreaks” that allow users to bypass safety controls.After the paper’s publication, Altman tried to push out Toner because he thought the paper was critical of the company.
[23] She claimed that the board hadn't been informed about the launch of ChatGPT, and found out about its release through the social media platform Twitter.