Tasha McCauley

Tasha McCauley became an adjunct senior management scientist at the RAND Corporation in 2023. She had earlier directed an innovation lab at Singularity University, co-founded the robotics startup Fellow Robots with a colleague from there, and then co-founded GeoSim Systems, a geospatial technology company, where she was chief executive until 2022.¹

With her husband, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, she signed the Asilomar AI Principles, 23 principles of AI governance published in 2017, which Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever and Elon Musk also signed. She sat on the advisory board of the Center for the Governance of AI with Helen Toner, and on the U.K. board of the Effective Ventures Foundation, the parent organization of the Centre for Effective Altruism.¹

OpenAI

McCauley was one of the independent directors of the nonprofit board of OpenAI which, on November 17, 2023, announced that Altman would leave as chief executive after "a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities." The company listed its board that day as "OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, independent directors Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology's Helen Toner."² OpenAI directors, according to the company's own description, held no equity and received no other compensation.¹

On November 29, 2023, Altman returned as chief executive with a new initial board of Bret Taylor, Larry Summers and D'Angelo. He wrote that he was "grateful to Adam, Tasha, and Helen for working with us to come to this solution that best serves the mission," and "sincerely thankful to Helen and Tasha for investing a huge amount of effort in this process." McCauley, Toner and Sutskever left the board; D'Angelo stayed.³

The Cruz Letter

On September 13, 2024, Senator Ted Cruz, ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, wrote to RAND's president Jason Matheny about RAND's part in drafting the AI executive order of 2023. "RAND has both personal and financial connections to incumbent AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI," he wrote. "For instance, you are one of five members on Anthropic's 'Long-Term Benefit Trust,' which oversees the AI company." McCauley, he continued, was "an adjunct senior management scientist at RAND and effective altruism advocate" who had "just left OpenAI's board last November." He added: "RAND is also connected with Open Philanthropy, the charitable arm of these AI companies. Last year, Open Philanthropy gave RAND $16 million to advance its 'work on potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence.'"⁴