OpenAI poaches DeepMind's Shazeer, adds ex-Trump AI
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- Noam Shazeer announced his departure from Google on Wednesday, joining OpenAI just two years after Google rehired him in a $2.7 billion deal that gave the tech giant access to Character AI's technology.
- Shazeer co-authored the seminal 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need" that introduced the Transformer architecture and is credited as one of the foundational minds behind modern generative AI.
- Shazeer had internal posts about transgender identity and Israel's war in Gaza deleted by Google management before his departure, per The Information, raising questions about whether those controversies will follow him to OpenAI.
- Dean Ball, a former Trump White House AI policy official who helped publish America's AI Action Plan, will join OpenAI on July 6 to lead a new team called Strategic Futures.
- Ball's team will report directly to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon and focus on catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labor market impact, and the relationship between frontier labs and the U.S. government.
- OpenAI's twin hires come as rival Anthropic faces a Trump-ordered export control ban on its latest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, forcing the company to take the models down entirely to avoid noncompliance.
- Ball wrote that "internal governance will be more central to the future of AI than most people realize," arguing AI labs will "almost by necessity" have to lead on governance decisions.
Why it matters: OpenAI is simultaneously locking in a foundational AI researcher and a White House-connected policy insider ahead of its IPO, while competitor Anthropic is being squeezed by federal export controls on its latest models. For S-1 risk-factor purposes, Ball is what it looks like when a company insures itself against government interference by hiring the people who write the rules — and Shazeer is what it looks like to pay up for technical credibility.
