OpenAI Hires AI Pioneer Noam Shazeer and Former White House Policy Chief Dean Ball Ahead of IPO

OpenAI, gearing up for its initial public offering, is bolstering its team with two prominent hires: Noam Shazeer, a co-author of the seminal “Attention Is All You Need” paper and co-founder of Character AI, and Dean Ball, a former White House AI policy official under President Donald Trump.

Shazeer announced his departure from Google on Wednesday. He had been at the tech giant since 2000, taking only a three-year hiatus to co-found Character AI. Google re-hired Shazeer two years ago in a $2.7 billion deal that gave the company access to the startup’s technology. Shazeer is widely regarded as a foundational figure in modern generative AI, having co-authored the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture.

According to The Information, before leaving Google, Shazeer reportedly stirred controversy on internal messaging boards with posts on transgender identity and Israel’s war in Gaza, which management subsequently deleted. It remains unclear whether these controversies will follow him to OpenAI.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is also strengthening its policy credentials by bringing on Dean Ball. Ball served briefly in the White House last year, helping to publish America’s AI Action Plan before stepping down to rejoin the Foundation for American Innovation as a senior fellow. On Thursday, Ball announced on X that he will join OpenAI on July 6 as the leader of a new team called “Strategic Futures.” The team will focus on “catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labor market impact, and the relationship between the frontier labs, governments (particularly the U.S. Federal Government), and society,” Ball wrote in a blog post. He added that the team will cover both public-facing policy and internal governance, emphasizing that “internal governance will be more central to the future of AI than most people realize.” Ball will report directly to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon.

Ball’s move comes as rival Anthropic faces renewed pressure from the U.S. government. Late last week, President Trump ordered an export control ban on Anthropic’s latest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, forcing the company to take them down to avoid noncompliance.