Top OpenAI official Dean Ball is in the middle of a heated feud with the Trump administration – and White House officials warn that Sam Altman’s firm risked its relationship with the government by hiring him for a senior role, The Post has learned.
Ball infuriated Trump AI officials last month after claiming in an X post that the White House should create “regulatory risk” — or new rules imposing consequences on US firms — to discourage use of Chinese AI models. White House AI czar David Sacks questioned if Ball was “confessing to a regulatory capture strategy” to benefit OpenAI, while Pentagon AI chief Emil Michael slammed Ball as the AI world’s “supreme village idiot.”
The incident was just the latest sign of long-simmering bad blood between key White House figures and Ball, who served a four-month stint on Trump’s AI team from April to August of last year. Ball became a vocal critic of Trump’s AI strategy after leaving the administration, even as he billed himself as a key architect of the White House’s high-profile AI Action Plan — a detailed roadmap for how the US could win the AI race.
Three White House officials with direct knowledge of the matter allege that Ball has exaggerated his role on that project. The officials, who requested anonymity to discuss the situation, described Ball as a “junior-to-mid-level policy analyst” whose ideas were regularly ignored by decision-makers – and say he never obtained a security clearance, which is needed to participate in high-level discussions.
One of the officials said it was the “most ludicrous assertion imaginable” that Ball played a senior role in crafting the AI Action Plan.
“Everyone who was actually involved in architecting it is way too nice to say it in frank terms,” the official said. “He was at best a nuisance and at worst irrelevant.”
A source close to Ball pushed back on claims that he exaggerated his work at the White House, noting that a blueprint written by Ball shortly after the 2024 election for the new administration touches on many of the concepts — such as maintaining export controls on AI chips, rewriting the National Institute of Standard and Technology’s AI Risk Management Framework, and building automated labs — that ended up in the AI Action Plan.
Asked for comment, an OpenAI spokesperson pointed to a June 18 tweet by the company’s chief strategy officer Jason Kwon.
“Really glad Dean is joining OpenAI,” Kwon wrote. “He’s spent a lot of time thinking seriously about the biggest questions frontier labs need to get right: risk, governance, frontier policy issues, and what comes next. We won’t always agree on everything, which is a good thing. This is a really important moment for these debates, and we’ll be better for having him pressure-test and shape our thinking.”
Ball’s role will be focused on research rather than lobbying or political outreach, the spokesperson added.
‘A little puzzled’
Tensions between Ball and the White House first came to a head last February during the administration’s high-profile spat with Anthropic – when he became one of the loudest voices defending CEO Dario Amodei’s firm after President Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using its models.
At the time, Ball called the Pentagon’s decision to label Anthropic as a supply-chain risk a “psychotic power grab” and “almost certainly illegal.” He also outlined his problems with the Pentagon’s approach during an widely-cited interview on “The Ezra Klein Show.”
In a Substack post announcing his hiring as OpenAI’s “head of strategic futures” in June, Ball, 34, wrote that he would be “charged with shaping frontier AI policy,” including “catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labor market impact, and the relationship between the frontier labs, governments (particularly the US federal government), and society.”
The White House is “a little puzzled by what value OpenAI sees in hiring him” given Ball’s tense relationships with some of his former colleagues, a second administration official said.
Any backlash against Ball could also cause trouble for OpenAI, which so far has avoided the kind of public criticism and backlash that its chief rival Anthropic has regularly faced in its dealings with the Trump administration.
“We want to and continue to work with OpenAI, just given its importance and our other relationships at the firm, including Sam,” the second official said.
“But [Ball] isn’t helping, and his idiotic commentary on X about our AI policies that’s rooted in the fake premise that he has an insider perspective into our operations is actively undermining OpenAI. He has and continues to turn a lot of people off.”
The first official added that Ball, who lacks a technical background in AI research or development, was “seen as sort of silly and underinformed” during his time at the White House and often suggested ideas that ran afoul of the vision outlined by decision-makers, including Sacks and White House tech adviser Michael Kratsios.
“The overwhelming consensus on everyone that has worked with him during his time here was that his recommendations were often minimally listened to, and that the sort of ideological and intellectual direction that he was approaching a policy from was extremely contrary to the president’s own priorities about American AI dominance,” the first official added.
On his personal website, Ball describes himself as a “Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he was the primary staff drafter of America’s AI Action Plan.”
“He gets a lot of play around Washington as someone who is in the know when it comes to how the Trump administration is thinking about AI policy when the vast majority of people who are responsible for actually devising and implementing AI policy and who the president actually consults find him to be silly and irrelevant,” the first White House official said.
After leaving the White House, Ball worked at the Foundation for American Innovation, a tech-focused Washington, DC, think tank, and as a policy fellow at the AI policy nonprofit Fathom. In the past, he worked as a research fellow for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
‘Thought leader’ claim
Fathom CEO Andrew Freedman defended Ball in an interview with The Post, describing him as an “intellectual thought leader” whose views on AI policy were widely read inside the Beltway even before he joined the White House. Freedman asserted that Ball has gained respect — and some enemies — precisely because he is willing to speak honestly when he disagrees with the administration.
“Anybody who said [Ball] had anything but a very significant role in crafting the White House AI Action Plan is engaging in some pretty hardcore retconning,” he said.
The social media uproar last month centered on Ball’s remarks regarding Kimi K3, an open-source model made by Beijing-based Moonshot AI that claims capabilities similar to those of OpenAI and Anthropic.
US officials have been voicing concern about the rise of open-source models, which are made available for a fraction of the cost of the closed-source models offered by US frontier labs.
In a lengthy X post, Ball argued the long-term success of open-source models would lead to “full AI communism.”
“I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open Chinese models,” Ball wrote.
Sacks fired back, writing that Ball’s call for the “weaponization of regulatory uncertainty as a competitive tool should be completely unacceptable.”
The Pentagon’s Michael waded into the fray after Ball asserted that key government agencies, including the War Department, had “already used ill-justified claims of danger” to block employees from using Chinese AI.
“Dean Ball has perhaps the biggest gap between actual IQ and his own perceived IQ of anyone in the industry (about 40 points),” Michael wrote.
