OpenAI poaches top Google AI talent ahead of IPO push

OpenAI is making two high-profile hires that speak to the next phase of its ambitions: one aimed at deepening technical credibility, the other at strengthening its Washington playbook. The company landed Noam Shazeer, one of the architects of the Transformer architecture that powers modern large language models, and Dean Ball, a former White House AI policy adviser who will help steer frontier governance from inside the company.

Shazeer said June 17 that he would leave Google to join OpenAI after serving as vice president of engineering at Google and co-lead of Gemini. He is best known as a co-author of the 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need, which introduced the Transformer design now embedded across most major AI systems. Google had brought him back in August 2024 after paying about $2.7 billion tied to Character.AI talent, underscoring how fiercely the top tier of AI researchers is being fought over by rival labs.

Ball will join OpenAI on July 6 and lead a new unit called Strategic Futures, reporting to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon. The Foundation for American Innovation said the small team will focus on frontier AI policy, internal governance, catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labor-market impact, and the relationship between frontier labs, governments, and society. Ball most recently served as a senior policy adviser for artificial intelligence and emerging technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and he was a primary author of the White House AI Action Plan. He will remain a nonresident senior fellow at FAI.

The timing is hard to miss. OpenAI confidentially filed draft IPO paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 8, a move that has put the company under even brighter scrutiny as it moves toward a public listing. Reports have placed its last valuation at about $852 billion and said it planned an employee share sale to provide liquidity ahead of the offering.

The company is also navigating a broader debate over who should control advanced AI and how much public oversight is appropriate. Sam Altman recently met with Sen. Bernie Sanders to discuss public ownership in AI, while other reporting has said U.S. officials have discussed whether the federal government could take an equity stake in major AI companies. By adding Shazeer and Ball in the same week, OpenAI is signaling that it wants to compete in Silicon Valley and Washington at the same time.