Helen Toner is Interim Executive Director at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), a policy research organization focused on the security implications of emerging technology. Her CSET profile lists her expertise across artificial intelligence, export controls, machine learning, military-civil fusion, and strategy, with a particular emphasis on technological competition between the United States and China.
Before CSET she was a Senior Research Analyst at Open Philanthropy, advising policymakers and grantmakers on AI policy and strategy, and she spent time living in Beijing as a research affiliate of Oxford University’s Center for the Governance of AI, studying the Chinese AI ecosystem. She holds an MA in Security Studies from Georgetown along with a BSc in chemical engineering and a diploma in languages from the University of Melbourne.
Toner has written for outlets including Foreign Affairs, the Economist, and TIME, and has testified before several congressional committees on AI competition and governance. For a general reader, she represents the growing community of analysts working at the intersection of frontier AI and national policy, where questions about safety, export controls, and great-power competition increasingly overlap.