Chris Lehane is one of the best in the business at making bad news disappear. Al Gore’s press secretary during the Clinton years, Airbnb’s chief crisis manager through every regulatory nightmare from here to Brussels – Lehane knows how to spin. Now he’s two years into what might be his most impossible gig yet: as OpenAI’s VP of global policy, his job is to convince the world that OpenAI genuinely gives a damn about democratizing artificial intelligence while the company increasingly behaves like, well, every other tech giant that’s ever claimed to be different.

I had 20 minutes with him on stage at the Elevate conference in Toronto earlier this week – 20 minutes to get past the talking points and into the real contradictions eating away at OpenAI’s carefully constructed image. It wasn’t easy or entirely successful. Lehane is genuinely good at his job. He’s likable. He sounds reasonable. He admits uncertainty. He even talks about waking up at 3 a.m. worried about whether any of this will actually benefit humanity.

But good intentions don’t mean much when your company is subpoenaing critics, draining economically depressed towns of water and electricity, and bringing dead celebrities back to life to assert your market dominance.

The company’s Sora problem is really at the root of everything else. The video generation tool launched last week with copyrighted material seemingly baked right into it.