OpenAI brings on Noam Shazeer and Dean Ball ahead of IPO

OpenAI is bringing on Noam Shazeer and Dean Ball as it prepares for its public debut. Shazeer previously co-led Gemini at Google and founded Character AI. Shazeer announced his departure from Google on Wednesday. He had worked there since 2000, except for three years when he co-founded the startup. Google brought him back two years ago through a $2.7 billion deal. Shazeer co- Ball held a short position in the White House last year. There he assisted with America's AI Action Plan before returning to the Foundation for American Innovation as a senior fellow. Ball announced on X Thursday that he will join OpenAI July 6 to head the Strategic Futures team. The team will support leadership on frontier AI policy and report to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon. Focus areas include catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labor market impact, and relations with governments and society. The team will cover public policy and internal governance. Ball wrote that AI labs must lead on governance decisions and that internal governance will be more central than most realize. The hiring coincides with challenges for rival Anthropic. President Donald Trump ordered an export control ban on its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, forcing the company to remove them to avoid noncompliance. TechCrunch contacted OpenAI for more information.