OpenAI is bolstering its leadership team with two significant appointments ahead of its anticipated public launch: Noam Shazeer, a distinguished AI pioneer from Google DeepMind, and Dean Ball, a former AI policy official from the Trump White House.
Shazeer, who served as a co-lead at Gemini and founded the AI role-playing startup Character AI, announced his departure on Wednesday. His career at Google began in 2000, with a three-year hiatus to co-found Character AI. Two years ago, Google notably re-hired Shazeer in a substantial $2.7 billion deal that also secured the tech giant access to his startup’s innovative technology.
This strategic hire is the latest in a series of high-profile talent movements among leading AI research institutions, including Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. Shazeer is widely recognized as one of the foundational minds behind modern generative AI, most notably co-authoring the seminal 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the revolutionary Transformer architecture.
Prior to his exit from Google, Shazeer had reportedly been involved in internal political discussions. According to The Information, his opinions on transgender identity and the conflict in Gaza, shared on internal messaging boards, led to the deletion of his posts by management.
Whether these past controversies will follow him to his new role remains to be seen. In parallel, OpenAI is also strengthening its policy expertise by welcoming Dean Ball. Ball recently completed a brief tenure in the White House last year, where he played a key role in publishing "America’s AI Action Plan," before returning to the techno-libertarian think tank, the Foundation for American Innovation, as a senior fellow.
Announcing his new position on X on Thursday, Ball stated, “I am pleased and honored to announce that, on July 6, I’ll be joining OpenAI as leader of a new team called Strategic Futures.” He further clarified the team's mission: “Our mandate will be to help the company’s leadership shape frontier AI policy.”
Ball will report directly to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon. In a blog post, Ball detailed that this “small, high-agency team” will concentrate on “matters pertaining to: catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labor market impact, and the relationship between the frontier labs, governments (particularly the U.S. Federal Government), and society.”
He added that the Strategic Futures team's responsibilities will span both public-facing policy initiatives and internal governance. Ball emphasized the critical nature of the latter, noting that AI labs will be compelled “almost by necessity” to take the lead in AI governance decisions.
“In other words, internal governance will be more central to the future of AI than most people realize,” Ball wrote.
Ball’s decision to join OpenAI, arguably a favored AI entity within the current administration, coincides with Anthropic's renewed regulatory challenges with the U.S. government. Late last week, President Donald Trump issued an export control ban on Anthropic’s latest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, forcing the AI firm to completely withdraw them to ensure compliance. This scenario starkly illustrates how a company can solidify its insider standing while a competitor faces significant regulatory pressure, offering a clear example for those monitoring "government interference" as a risk factor.
TechCrunch has reached out to OpenAI for further details on these developments.
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