OpenAI is bringing big names to the team ahead of its public debut: Google DeepMind AI legend Noam Shazeer and former Trump White House AI policy chief Dean Ball.
Shazeer, a partner at Gemini and the creator of AI simulation startup Character AI, announced his departure on Wednesday. He had been at Google since 2000, only leaving for a three-year stint when he left to found Character AI. Two years ago, Google rehired Shazeer in a $2.7 billion deal that gave the tech giant access to the startup’s technology.
The move is the latest in a series of shuffles among top AI labs, including Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. Shazeer is credited with being one of the fundamental minds behind modern artificial intelligence. He co-authored the seminal 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the creation of the Transformer.
Before leaving Google, Shazeer is said to have been stirring the pot when it came to political issues. According to The Information, Shazeer expressed views on internal message boards about transgender identity and Israel’s war on Gaza that led to management deleting his posts.
Whether those controversies will follow him to his new employer remains to be seen. Meanwhile, OpenAI is also adding to its policy credentials by bringing Football into the fold. Ball had a brief stint last year in the White House, where he helped publish America’s AI Action Plan before stepping down to join the techno-libertarian think tank the Foundation for American Innovation as an adult.
“I am excited and honored to announce that, on July 6, I will be joining OpenAI as the leader of a new team called Strategic Futures,” Ball wrote on X on Thursday. “Our job will be to help the company’s leadership shape the AI policy of the frontier.”
Ball will report directly to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon. The “small, high-agency team” will focus on “issues related to: disaster risk, duplicated development, labor market impact, and the relationship between border labs, governments (especially the Federal Government), and the public,” Ball wrote in a blog post.
The Strategic Futures team will cover both public-facing policy and internal governance, he added. That last one is important — Ball noted that “almost by necessity,” AI labs will have to take the lead in AI governance decisions.
“In other words, internal governance it will be more central to the future of AI than most people think,” Ball wrote.
Ball’s decision to join OpenAI — arguably the AI favorite in governance — comes as Anthropic battles with the US government. At the end of last week, President Donald Trump ordered to close the export control of the latest models of Anthropic, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, which led the AI company to be forced to completely reduce the models to avoid incompatibility. For anyone who had “government interference” on their S-1 bingo card at risk, Ball is what it looks like when a company locks down its internal status while a competitor is challenged.
TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI for more details.
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