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

OpenAI is bringing some big names to the team ahead of its public debut: Google DeepMind AI legend Noam Shazeer and former Trump White House AI policy official Dean Ball.

Shazeer, co-leader at Gemini and founder of AI role-playing startup Character AI, announced his departure from Google on Wednesday. He had been with the company since 2000 and only left for a three-year stint when he left to co-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 changes among top AI labs, including Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta. Shazeer is considered one of the fundamental minds behind modern generative AI. He co-authored the seminal 2017 article “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the Transformer architecture.

Before leaving Google, Shazeer had also reportedly stirred the pot when it came to political issues. According to The informationShazeer expressed his views on transgender identity and Israel’s war in Gaza on internal message boards, which led to management removing his posts.

Whether those controversies will follow him to his new employer remains to be seen. In the meantime, OpenAI is also strengthening its policy credentials by bringing Ball to the team. Ball had a brief stint in the White House last year, where he helped publish the U.S. AI Action Plan before stepping down to rejoin the techno-libertarian think tank the Foundation for American Innovation as a senior fellow.

“I am excited and honored to announce that I will be joining OpenAI on July 6 as the leader of a new team called Strategic Futures,” Ball wrote on X on Thursday. “Our mandate will be to help the company’s leadership shape groundbreaking AI policies.”

Ball will report directly to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon. The “small, multi-agency team” will focus on “matters relating to: catastrophic risk, recursive self-enhancement, labor market impact, and the relationship between the border laboratories, governments (particularly the U.S. federal government), and society,” Ball wrote in an article. blog post.

The Strategic Futures team will cover both public policy and internal governance, he added. The latter is important: Ball noted that AI labs will have to take the lead on AI governance decisions “almost out of necessity.”

“In other words: internal management will be more important to the future of AI than most people realize,” Ball wrote.

Ball’s decision to join OpenAI – arguably an AI favorite in government – ​​comes as Anthropic battles with the US government once again. Late last week, President Donald Trump ordered an export control ban on Anthropic’s latest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, resulting in the AI ​​company being forced to remove the models entirely to avoid non-compliance. For anyone with “government interference” on their S-1 risk factor bingo card, Ball is what it looks like when a company locks in its insider status while a rival is being squeezed.

TechCrunch has reached out to OpenAI for more information.