Openai Hires Former Trump Ai Official Dean Ball

Dean Ball, a former top White House official who helped shape the Trump administration’s artificial intelligence policy, is set to join OpenAI, according to four people familiar with the matter who were granted anonymity to discuss a personnel move that has not been announced publicly.

According to two of the people familiar, Ball will join the company in the first week of July as head of strategic futures and will report to Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer.

The primary author on the AI Action Plan released by the White House last summer, Ball left the administration soon after that document published for a role at the Foundation for American Innovation, a right-leaning tech think tank at which Ball serves as a senior fellow. In March, he was named a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

While Ball has continued to have the White House’s ear, since early March he has emerged as a leading critic of the Trump administration’s ongoing feud with Anthropic — including the Pentagon’s decision to label the company a supply chain risk and last week’s decision by the White House to impose export restrictions on Anthropic’s new Fable AI model.

Before joining the White House, Ball was a researcher with George Mason University’s Mercatus Center and was a program manager at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

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

Asked for comment, Ball pointed to a Substack post that confirmed the news. He wrote that he will lead “a small, high-agency team ... 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.”

OpenAI declined to comment.

Cheyenne Haslett contributed to this report.