OpenAI added two prominent figures to its ranks in the same week in June 2026, hiring AI researcher Noam Shazeer from Google DeepMind and former Trump administration AI policy official Dean Ball as the company prepares for its public debut.
Shazeer, who co-authored the influential 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need” — which introduced the Transformer architecture underlying modern generative AI — announced his departure from Google on Wednesday. He had been at Google since 2000, with a three-year break to co-found AI role-playing startup Character AI. Google re-hired him two years ago as part of a $2.7 billion deal that gave the company access to Character AI’s technology. At Google, Shazeer served as a co-lead on Gemini. Before leaving, he had reportedly posted on internal message boards about transgender identity and Israel’s war in Gaza, with management deleting the posts, according to The Information.
Ball, who briefly served in the White House last year helping publish America’s AI Action Plan before returning to the Foundation for American Innovation as a senior fellow, announced on Thursday that he will join OpenAI on July 6. He will lead a new team called Strategic Futures, reporting to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon.
“Our mandate will be to help the company’s leadership shape frontier AI policy,” Ball wrote on X. The team will focus on catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labor market impact, and the relationship between frontier AI labs, governments, and society — covering both public-facing policy and internal governance.
The hires come as OpenAI’s rival Anthropic faces pressure from the U.S. government. Late last week, President Donald Trump ordered an export control ban on Anthropic’s latest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, forcing the company to take them offline entirely. Ball’s appointment may signal OpenAI’s effort to strengthen its standing with U.S. regulators and policymakers at a sensitive moment for the industry.
Source: TechCrunch