Anthropic and OpenAI have hired at least five former Trump officials since February

Anthropic and OpenAI have appointed at least five former Trump administration officials to senior policy and strategy posts since February, as frontier AI companies accelerate a coordinated effort to embed Washington ties inside their labs.

Anthropic has installed two Trump-era figures, while OpenAI has onboarded at least three, according to CNBC reporting this week. The hires span board seats, infrastructure strategy, national security policy, and strategic foresight.

Why the White House matters now

The recruitment drive carries direct commercial stakes. The Trump administration controls federal procurement, supply-chain designations, export controls, and antitrust posture toward the AI sector.

"Frontier AI companies are aware that the Trump administration has a lot of levers over their business, from federal procurement and supply-chain designations to export controls and everything in between, and that it's willing to use them," said Michelle Nie Duncan, a visiting fellow with the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security.

Duncan framed the urgency in sharper terms. "They have learned from the Anthropic episode that it pays to be on the good side of the White House," she told CNBC.

The episode Duncan cited occurred in September, when a U.S. appeals court upheld a Pentagon designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk. The ruling followed a public dispute between Anthropic and the administration at the start of the year.

President Donald Trump has called AI safety concerns a "hoax" and advocated for self-regulation, while suggesting that the Department of Justice and other agencies could "rein" in AI development.

Anthropic's two hires

Anthropic named Chris Liddell, deputy White House chief of staff during Trump's first term, to its board of directors in February. The move gave the lab a sitting board member with direct Oval Office experience.

Sihao Huang joined as head of frontier compute strategy in September. Huang previously served as a senior policy advisor for AI and emerging technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). His professional website states he led the "AI team at OSTP & coordinating national security, science policy, and semiconductor issues."

Huang posted on X in September that he will work on infrastructure expansion and "planning for rapid AI progress." The scope ties directly to one of Anthropic's largest capital commitments to date.

The company signed a roughly $45 billion cloud deal with neocloud Nscale in August, according to CNBC, to secure training and serving capacity for its models.

Anthropic founder and chief executive Dario Amodei has invested personally in repairing the relationship. He joined a White House lunch between Trump and AI executives and dined privately with the president in September.

OpenAI's three hires

OpenAI confirmed last week that Thomas Lind, formerly the lead for AI policy at the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD), has joined its national security policy team. The ONCD serves as the principal advisor to the president on cybersecurity policy and strategy. Lind will lead cyber and strategic risk.

Sasha Baker, who heads OpenAI's national security policy team and served as deputy under secretary of defense for policy in the Biden administration, framed the hire as a response to a shifting threat picture.

"[Lind's] expertise is even more important as AI becomes central to the national security agenda, with the Office of the National Cyber Director playing a growing role in shaping AI policy," Baker said.

Dean Ball, a senior policy advisor at OSTP in 2025 who helped draft the Trump administration's America AI Action Plan, joined OpenAI in July as head of strategic futures. OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon described the role in the same terms used by frontier safety researchers.

Ball will "help us pressure-test our assumptions and think through issues ranging from frontier safety and the economic impacts of increasingly capable systems to the evolving relationship between governments, companies, and society," Kwon said.

OpenAI also hired Peter Bowman-Davis, the former chief AI officer at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in March for work on model training and hardware engineering, according to his LinkedIn profile.

What the companies are still recruiting for

Both Anthropic and OpenAI are running active searches for additional political engagement hires. The pipeline signals an institutional commitment beyond the five named executives.

Duncan tied the recruitment push to the financial stakes ahead for the labs.

"With companies like OpenAI and Anthropic gearing up for some of the largest IPOs of all time, many also see this as a chance to be part of something historic," Nie Duncan said, noting compensation packages that government service cannot match.

What the talent flow signals about governance

The migration cuts across party lines. Baker served in the Biden Pentagon. Liddell, Ball, Huang, Lind, and Bowman-Davis served in Trump's orbit. The shared destination is the lab.

"The AI labs are becoming some of the most consequential institutions in the world, and for officials who are serious about shaping the future of AI governance, inside the labs is where a lot of leverage currently lies," Nie Duncan said.

The sentence compresses the strategic logic of every hire on this list: the regulatory state cannot regulate what it cannot staff.

Operational stakes

The infrastructure footprint under negotiation makes the personnel moves concrete. Anthropic's roughly $45 billion Nscale arrangement sets a floor for the talent the company must manage. OpenAI's national security team now advises on export licensing, Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program accreditation, and procurement pipelines where the Pentagon sits as a major customer.

The appeals court decision in September locked in Anthropic's supply-chain risk tag absent further litigation. The board appointment of Liddell three months earlier, followed by the Huang hire in September, suggests an explicit course correction.

OpenAI handled the inquiry with a redirect. The company pointed CNBC to previously issued statements on two of the three hires attributed to its national security and policy work. Anthropic and the White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The next signal worth watching will land in the courtroom or on the docket before the end of the fiscal year, where export control rulemaking and federal procurement standards will determine whether the personnel rotation translates into policy access or merely pays for political intelligence.