OpenAI is bringing on some big guns in the lead-up to its IPO

## Key Hires Ahead of the IPO

OpenAI is bolstering its leadership roster as it prepares for a public offering, adding two high‑profile figures from the AI and policy worlds.

### Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

- Background: Noam Shazeer, a co‑lead at Google DeepMind’s Gemini project and founder of the AI role‑playing startup Character AI, announced his departure from Google on Wednesday. - Tenure at Google: He originally joined Google in 2000, took a three‑year leave to co‑found Character AI, and was rehired two years ago in a $2.7 billion transaction that gave Google access to the startup’s technology. - Technical Contributions: Shazeer is widely recognized as a foundational mind behind modern generative AI. He co‑authored the seminal 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the Transformer architecture that powers today’s large language models. - Internal Controversies: Prior to leaving, Shazeer reportedly voiced opinions on internal messaging boards about transgender identity and the Israel‑Gaza conflict, leading to management deleting his posts, according to The Information.

### Dean Ball Leads Strategic Futures

- Policy Experience: Dean Ball served briefly in the Trump White House, where he helped publish America’s AI Action Plan before returning to the Foundation for American Innovation as a senior fellow. - New Role: On July 6, Ball announced on X that he will join OpenAI as the head of a new unit called Strategic Futures. - Reporting Line: He will report directly to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon. - Mandate: The “small, high‑agency team” will focus on: - Catastrophic risk and recursive self‑improvement - Labor‑market impact - Relationships between frontier AI labs, governments (especially the U.S. federal government), and society - Scope: The team will address both public‑facing policy and internal governance, with Ball emphasizing that “internal governance will be more central to the future of AI than most people realize.”

## Contextual Landscape

Ball’s move comes as rival Anthropic faces heightened regulatory pressure. Late last week, former President Donald Trump imposed an export‑control ban on Anthropic’s latest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, forcing the company to remove the models to avoid non‑compliance. Ball’s addition underscores OpenAI’s strategy to secure insider policy expertise while competitors navigate governmental scrutiny.

TechCrunch has reached out to OpenAI for further comment.