OpenAI’s Lehane Calls AI the Number-One Issue of the 2028 Election

OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane has written a memo arguing that AI will be the number-one issue of the 2028 presidential election and laying out five questions he says candidates must answer to build an AI agenda. The memo was made public on November 2, 2026. In the memo, titled “2028: The AI Election”, Lehane writes that the candidate who articulates a “compelling third path” between those who would let AI advance “without speed limits” and those who would keep control of the technology “in the hands of a self-appointed elite” will have “an opportunity to define a new contract for this new era.” He compares the 2028 race to the 1932 election, when, he writes, industrialization had broken down the old social contract and Franklin D.

Roosevelt’s New Deal reimagined it. The memo describes AI as a general purpose technology on the scale of the wheel, the printing press, and electricity, and notes that 2028 will feature the first truly wide-open Democratic presidential primary since 1992. The memo draws on polling Lehane says he has seen and…