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

OpenAI is adding AI researcher Noam Shazeer and former White House policy official Dean Ball to its staff as the company moves toward an expected initial public offering, according to a report Wednesday. Shazeer, a co-lead on Google DeepMind's Gemini project, announced his departure from Google, where he had worked since 2000 with a three-year break to co-found AI role-playing startup Character AI [1]. Google re-hired Shazeer in a $2.7 billion deal two years ago that gave the company access to Character AI's technology [1]. Shazeer co-authored the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the Transformer architecture foundational to modern generative AI [1]. Ball will join OpenAI on July 6 as leader of a new team called Strategic Futures [1]. "Our mandate will be to help the company's leadership shape frontier AI policy," Ball wrote on X [1]. The team will report to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon and focus on catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labor market impact, and the relationship between frontier labs and governments, particularly the U.S. Federal Government [1]. Ball emphasized that internal governance will be central to AI's future, writing, "In other words, internal governance will be more central to the future of AI than most people realize" [1]. Ball previously served briefly in the Trump White House, where he helped publish America's AI Action Plan before returning to the Foundation for American Innovation as a senior fellow [1]. His hiring comes as rival AI firm Anthropic faces a U.S. government export control ban on its latest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, ordered by President Donald Trump late last week, forcing the company to take the models down to avoid noncompliance [1]. OpenAI, headquartered in San Francisco, operates as a for-profit public benefit corporation partially controlled by a nonprofit foundation [2]. The company conducted a $6.6 billion share sale in October 2025 that valued it at $500 billion [2]. Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI members Daniela and Dario Amodei, had an estimated valuation of $965 billion in May 2026 and also plans to go public [10]. Since January 2026, Anthropic has been in conflict with the U.S. Department of Defense over the use of its products for military purposes and mass domestic surveillance [11]. The hires represent the latest personnel moves among top AI labs including Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta [1]. OpenAI has not yet responded to a request for comment [1].