Rising Tide

Rising Tide is a personal Substack newsletter authored by Helen Toner, launched on April 1, 2025. The newsletter's tagline is "Intermittent thoughts on navigating the transition to a world with extremely advanced AI systems" and it has attracted thousands of subscribers on Substack. Helen Toner is a researcher at the intersection of AI, national security, and China policy. She helped found Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) in 2019, where she has served as Director of Strategy and Foundational Research Grants and was appointed Interim Executive Director effective September 2, 2025. Prior to CSET, she was a senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy. From 2021 to 2023 she served on the OpenAI board of directors and was one of the board members who voted to remove Sam Altman as CEO in November 2023 before leaving the board following his reinstatement. The newsletter covers topics including the trajectory of AI capabilities, uneven AI performance across domains, geopolitical implications of AI infrastructure investment, AI governance, and national security concerns. Toner has described the newsletter as an experiment where she can think in public, share more speculative ideas, and write on topics that are not squarely within CSET's focus on national security.