OpenAI has hired former White House artificial intelligence adviser Dean Ball, adding a policy-focused hire in a new team buildout.

Ball will join OpenAI on July 6 as a leader of a new unit called Strategic Futures, he announced in a blog post on Substack. Ball will report to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon. The team will be "charged with shaping frontier AI policy, which is to say matters pertaining to: catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labor market impact, and the relationship between the frontier labs, governments (particularly the U.S. Federal Government), and society.”

Ball noted that "its work will cover both public-facing policy (for example, proposals for legislation) and internal governance within the lab, working in close collaboration with members of the technical staff, the Preparedness team, the legal team, policy staff from the National Security and Global Affairs teams, and the executive leadership of the company."

Ball helped draft the White House's AI Action Plan, which was released last summer and departed the administration shortly after it came out. He then joined the Foundation for American Innovation, where he is a senior fellow and will remain in his role while at OpenAI. 

In March, Ball was named a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a right-leaning think tank whose mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies.

Before entering government, Ball worked at George Mason University's Mercatus Center and held a program manager role at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. 

He has also held roles at the Manhattan Institute and ran a scholarship program at the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation.

Ball has also previously criticized the Trump administration's dispute with Anthropic, including the Pentagon's designation of the company as a supply chain risk and the White House's export limits on Anthropic's Fable AI model, Politico reported.

OpenAI has been on a hiring spree. The ChatGPT maker has hired 40 employees from Salesforce since the start of the year, as the company plans to double its workforce from 4,500 to 8,000 by the end of 2026, the Financial Times reported. 

Clint Gibler announced on X that he has joined OpenAI as a member of the technical staff and will be working with Michael Aiello, OpenAI’s head of product for cyber. 

Other recent hires at OpenAI include former Ironclad CEO Jason Boehmig, who will lead its product team responsible for building products for the legal industry and former Salesforce AgentExchange CEO Brian Landsman as its vice president of global partnerships.

Denise Dresser, who led Salesforce’s Slack business as CEO, departed the company in December to join the ChatGPT maker as the company’s chief revenue officer, The Information reported.

Photo: Shutterstock