Leading communications around each controversy, crisis and celebration is OpenAI’s first chief communications officer, Hannah Wong. Originally reporting directly to cofounder and CEO Sam Altman (as of August 18 she and the comms team now report to newly hired CEO of applications, Fidji Simo), Wong is tasked with quelling widespread fear surrounding AI’s societal impacts while educating 700 million active OpenAI users on rapidly releasing technological tools.
“I always loved being in consumer tech, especially Silicon Valley, because I love how it’s shaping the future,” says Wong, who joined the company in 2021 and was promoted to her position in August 2024. “The industry is imaging what the future could be, not just what it is today.”
Before transforming OpenAI’s eight-person communications team overseeing the 2022 launch of ChatGPT into a group of 50 global professionals, Wong had a seven-year stint at Apple leading communications surrounding Apple Pay, Apple Card, iCloud and iPad. During a five-year tenure at Edelman, she managed the agency’s Microsoft, Xbox and Twitter (now known as X) accounts.
“Hannah has done remarkable work leading us through one of the brightest and fastest comms spotlights in recent tech industry history,” Altman wrote in a company statement announcing Wong’s promotion last year. “This is very much recognizing what she already has been doing.”
OpenAI’s Super Bowl ad, The Intelligence Age, highlighted inventions such as the lightbulb, wheel and X-ray machine to signal the progression to artificial intelligence. (Photo credit: OpenAI, used with permission)
In her current role, Wong emphasizes a specific ethical pressure — which she notes is “felt by the whole organization” and “starts with the researchers who are helping to create the technology” — that comes with designing messaging for a company many consider the leading voice for AI. While OpenAI works with U.S. agency partners Outcast and LaunchSquad, 90% of communications are in-house, Wong says.
She tackles the pressure with product launch-focused marketing, accessible educational messaging and proactive crisis responses. These strategies positioned OpenAI for a remarkable past year — its annualized revenue hit $10 billion this June and is tracking to hit a target of $12.7 billion by the end of 2025. While OpenAI started as a nonprofit with the goal to “benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” according to its official company announcement in 2015, the company structure has since evolved to incorporate a for-profit arm — now a public benefit corporation (PBC) overseen by the nonprofit — into its business model.
From products to podcasts: ‘How people touch, feel and experience a brand’
Among the flashy, stunty and star-studded Super Bowl advertising lineup in February, OpenAI premiered an animated black-and-white spot, The Intelligence Age, highlighting inventions such as the lightbulb, wheel and X-ray machine. The 60-second spot lacked dialogue for a reason: OpenAI’s marketing, led by CMO Kate Rouch, revolves around products speaking for themselves.
Wong’s comms strategy prioritizes educational product launches “demystifying” OpenAI’s innovations to consumers, rather than pushing products with buzzy campaigns, because products are how “people touch, feel and experience a relationship with the brand,” Wong says. She learned this while observing OpenAI’s launches of ChatGPT and DALL·E 2, an image-generation tool that produces pictures based on user prompts.
“The world didn’t wake up to AI until people could start touching it, feeling it and really understanding how it impacts them,” Wong says, noting that before DALL·E 2, OpenAI was mostly focused on its API developer platform and hadn’t ventured into the world of consumer-facing products. “That’s a big part of why we focus on teaching people how to use our tools. If you didn’t have that, AI could just be this mystical thing you wouldn’t understand.”
Wong heavily prioritizes owned media — such as product announcements and responses to controversy on the company’s website, along with The OpenAI Podcast — to keep control of the conversation. To Wong, podcasts are one of the most “powerful mediums” for educating consumers while building personal connections, and her personal favorites include This American Life, Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel and Trevor Noah’s What Now?
“What I love about them is they tell deeper stories, bring out layers of insight and reveal people’s personalities in ways you can’t get through any other medium,” Wong says. “Podcasts have the luxury of time and intimacy — they can slow down, follow tangents and let you hear the unpolished, human moments that make someone’s perspective truly land. That depth was the inspiration for The OpenAI Podcast.”
The OpenAI Podcast, which Wong launched in June, aims to highlight the “personality, excitements and doubts” of tech leaders through “thoughtful, layered discussions,” she says. Three episodes have featured OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discussing the future of ChatGPT and AI-powered parenting; head of ChatGPT Nick Turley and OpenAI’s chief research officer Mark Chen conversing about the surprise of ChatGPT’s success; and OpenAI’s COO Brad Lightcap and chief economist Ronnie Chatterji analyzing AI’s potential impact on jobs. AI developer and consultant Andrew Mayne hosts the series.
“Hearing somebody’s voice and hearing a natural conversation builds this deeper connection, and humanizing people who work here is a really important part of building that trust,” Wong explains. “Hopefully, people feel like they’re just like a part of the conversation — one of the goals was to pull back the curtain and demystify this technology.”
Aside from The OpenAI Podcast, Wong takes a “top-down, bottom-up” approach to education comms to “make sure people aren’t being left behind,” meaning mobilizing press and media to reach broad audiences while empowering everyday users to share experiences and tips for AI tools. Take content creator Allie K. Miller, who teaches her 2 million followers how to use AI tools for “outfit help” and dictating emails; and videographer Sebastien Jefferies, who teaches his 1.3 million followers how to use AI to animate characters and generate theme music.
Wong’s emphasis on education addresses user fear of emerging tech. Outside the perceptions of AI experts, only 11% of U.S. adults are more excited than concerned about the increased use of AI in daily life, and only 23% of American adults believe AI will have a positive impact on work, according to a Pew Research Center study. The amount of Americans who are mostly concerned about AI has grown 14% since 2022.
“If someone is worried, we treat it seriously and we answer their questions,” Wong says, adding the importance of not “talking down” to users in the process. “But the challenge we face is when there aren’t actually easy answers. Driving clarity can be difficult when the topic is nuanced — like if we’re asked, ‘will AI take my job?’ the answer is not a clear cut yes or no.”
Resisting reactive: remembering goals amid rapid innovations, twists and turns
Driving “straightforward conversations” to put users’ “minds at ease,” about nuanced topics is a strategy that bleeds into Wong’s product launch strategies and crisis communications — especially considering the rapid pace of OpenAI’s innovation.
OpenAI’s roster of new features for 2025 includes ChatGPT Agent, a model of ChatGPT that interacts with websites autonomously; Study Mode to expand ChatGPT’s learning capabilities; Codex, an engineering agent to handle coding tasks; and 4o Image Generation for creating images with prompts.
“The pace of innovation is pretty insane,” Wong remarks of OpenAI’s progress this year, which includes the release of ChatGPT’s newest model, ChatGPT-5, in August. “It’s the most beautiful thing about this place, and it’s also the thing that’s the hardest.”
Additionally, OpenAI is in the process of shifting to a hybrid business model, “moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock,” Altman stated in a May 2025 letter to OpenAI employees. And while OpenAI originated and is still governed as a nonprofit, the repositioning of its former for-profit arm into a PBC means that “the nonprofit will continue to control the PBC, and will become a big shareholder in the PBC … giving the nonprofit resources to support programs so AI can benefit benefit many different communities, consistent with the mission,” continued Altman in his letter.
Despite OpenAI’s rapid pace, the company’s ethos and overarching goals remain centered in Wong’s comms strategy. Throughout announcing industry-altering products such as ChatGPT, responding to X owner Elon Musk and other high profile figures’ bids to acquire the business or educating users on lawsuit implications, Wong hasn’t let curveballs distract her team from OpenAI’s overall desired impact.
“If we get distracted by twists and turns, by crises and reactiveness, what’s urgent would always come above what’s important,” Wong explains. “We want to demonstrate the transformative benefits of this technology and show the impact it’s having — that’s the North Star.”
How a court order triggered a timely response
Wong’s largest crisis management instance yet was responding to a court order amid ongoing litigation between OpenAI and The New York Times, she says. Back in December, the publication sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement — arguing that the companies train AI models like ChatGPT with millions of New York Times articles without permission.
Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest investor, has invested over $13 billion into OpenAI since 2019, and the two tech giants ignited a partnership extending through 2030, allowing Microsoft to integrate OpenAI’s IP into products including Windows and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Tensions have risen as OpenAI has expressed interest in reducing Microsoft’s 20% cut of OpenAI’s revenue.
A flurry of publication deals followed The New York Times lawsuit filing. Last spring, OpenAI partnered with the Financial Times, The Atlantic and News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. In the next few months, Vogue and Vanity Fair owner Condé Nast, along with People and Better Homes and Gardens owner Dotdash Meredith, also established deals.
Despite a rise of publications offering OpenAI access to current and archived articles, The New York Times lawsuit persists. In June, the publication requested access to OpenAI’s user data indefinitely. This includes ChatGPT search history — which users have the option to clear after 30 days in OpenAI’s settings — and contradicts the tech company’s communications focus of trust and privacy.
“It was a very difficult time from a principles perspective,” Wong explains. “We felt very strongly that we needed to explain to users what was happening, and tried to think of all the questions a user would have about their data, and answer them proactively.”
In a swift response, Wong published an article, “How we’re responding to The New York Times’ data demands in order to protect user privacy,” on OpenAI’s website, opening with a statement from COO Lightcap. Following Wong’s signature, owned-media style, the article then metamorphoses into a Q&A format, addressing questions including “Is my data impacted?” and “What are your data retention policies?”
“It was an opportunity for us to share our principles and how we think about data,” Wong explains of the crisis response. “We can’t always control the things that happen around us, but we can control how we respond.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
