Anthropic and OpenAI Hire Trump Administration Alumni to Build Relationship with Washington

Anthropic and OpenAI have spent the past year recruiting former officials from President Trump’s administration into senior roles, a hiring pattern that tracks with frontier AI’s growing status as a matter of national security.

CNBC reports that Anthropic has brought on at least two former Trump officials this year. Chris Liddell, who served as deputy White House chief of staff during Trump’s first term, joined the company’s board of directors in February. In September, Sihao Huang, previously a senior policy advisor for AI and emerging technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, became Anthropic’s head of frontier compute strategy. Announcing the move on X, Huang said he would be “planning for rapid AI progress,” working on the company’s infrastructure expansion.

OpenAI has made at least three similar hires. The company confirmed last week that Thomas Lind, the former AI policy lead at the Office of the National Cyber Director, has joined to lead cyber and strategic risk on its national security policy team. The ONCD is the president’s principal advisor on cybersecurity policy and strategy. Sasha Baker, who leads that national security policy team and previously served as deputy under secretary of defense for policy under the Biden administration, said, “[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.”

OpenAI also hired Dean Ball in July as head of strategic futures. Ball was a senior policy advisor at the Office of Science and Technology Policy in 2025 and helped draft the Trump administration’s America’s AI Action Plan. In March, Peter Bowman-Davis joined OpenAI to work on model training and hardware engineering, according to his LinkedIn page. He had previously served as Chief AI Officer at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Both companies are currently hiring for multiple additional political engagement roles.

Michelle Nie Duncan, a visiting fellow with the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security, said the hiring reflects how much power the administration holds over the industry. “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,” she said.

The relationship between Anthropic and the White House has not always been smooth. The two had a public dispute at the start of the year, and a U.S. appeals court in September upheld a Pentagon designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk. Duncan said that episode changed how the industry operates now. “They have learned from the Anthropic episode that it pays to be on the good side of the White House,” she said.

Trump has repeatedly dismissed AI safety concerns, calling them a “hoax” and pushing for the industry to self-regulate, while also suggesting the DOJ and other law enforcement bodies could “rein” in AI companies if needed.

Duncan pointed to another motivation behind the hiring trend: the prospect of blockbuster public offerings. “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,” she said. She added that the labs themselves have become power centers in their own right. “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,” she said.

Breitbart News previously reported that Anthropic labeled the Trump Administration a business risk in its IPO prospectus:

AI giant Anthropic could go public as soon as November 9 according to individuals with knowledge of the matter. This would put it in line to begin trading before Thanksgiving. In a filing, seen by Reuters, the company stated that souring government sentiment could affect Anthropic’s relationships with commercial customers and partners, not just its dealings with federal agencies.

Government contracts currently account for less than one percent of Anthropic’s annual revenue, according to the company. But the prospectus still lays out a string of run-ins with federal authorities over the past year. In February, the president ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s models. The Department of Defense separately designated the company a supply-chain risk to national security. Anthropic wrote that it “may experience material revenue losses or business disruptions attributable to these events.”

AI giants simultaneously release powerful AI models and call for industry regulation, with China adding further complexity to the issue. David Sacks has pointed out that when AI titans like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk call for a slowdown, they are not doing so out of altruism, but with the motivation to capture the industry and exclude themselves from antitrust laws — a conflict that President Donald Trump and FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson recognize. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.