Artificial intelligence organization, OpenAI, is altering its policy team in the midst of various personnel changes, by bringing a former Google public policy director into its ranks. Bloomberg Law reported that Johanna Shelton has joined the project as the external affairs lead for US policy within the last month. Concurrently, an OpenAI in-house attorney focused solely on policy work, Cullen O’Keefe, has departed the company.
These shifts come in the wake of numerous alterations at OpenAI, including the brief dismissal of CEO Sam Altman last year and the recent departure of co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Furthermore, OpenAI has also dissolved its superalignment team. The team was assigned to guarantee the safety of artificial intelligence systems.
- Johanna Shelton, a former public policy director at Alphabet Inc.’s Google, joined OpenAI within the last month as external affairs lead for US policy.
- Shelton has spent nearly two decades at Google where she was involved with members of the Obama administration and other officials on key regulatory matters.
- Cullen O’Keefe, who was among OpenAI’s first in-house attorneys to focus solely on policy work, exited the company around the same time.
O’Keefe joined OpenAI in 2019 and most recently served as the research lead for policy frontiers. His responsibilities included leading emerging issues in AI governance and boosting societal resilience to shocks from advanced AI, with his work profile available in his online resume. O’Keefe is now working as the research director for the Institute for Law & AI, a Boston-based think tank.
OpenAI has yet to comment on these staffing changes and Google has declined to comment.