OpenAI, Anthropic Tap Former Trump Officials for Policy and Strategy Roles
OpenAI and Anthropic have hired at least five former Trump administration officials this year as AI policy, export controls, cybersecurity, and federal contracts become more important to their businesses. Anthropic added Chris Liddell to its board in February and named Sihao Huang head of frontier compute strategy in September. OpenAI brought on Dean Ball as head of strategic futures in July and has recruited other former government staff for policy and security roles.
Anthropic added Chris Liddell, a former deputy White House chief of staff under Trump, to its board in February. In September it named Sihao Huang, previously a senior OSTP policy adviser, to lead frontier compute strategy, a role tied to planning data-center, chip, and computing capacity needs.
OpenAI hired Dean Ball, an ex-White House technology policy adviser involved in the AI Action Plan, as head of strategic futures in July. It also brought Thomas Lind, formerly ONCD AI policy head, to handle cyber and strategic-risk matters, and Peter Bowman-Davis, ex-HHS chief AI officer, for model-training and hardware-engineering work.
These hires could give AI firms more fluency in federal processes, potentially shaping rules, contracts, and security decisions that affect workers, consumers, researchers, and smaller competitors. If government experience translates into influence, policy outcomes may reflect industry priorities more strongly, while public oversight and trust could depend on transparency. The broader labor market for AI policy and security expertise may also tighten, as public-sector talent moves to better-paid private roles.