Gravel Teens Join OpenAI Strategic Futures Team at $850 Billion Company
Updated
Updated · CNN · Aug 29
Gravel Teens Join OpenAI Strategic Futures Team at $850 Billion Company
3 articles · Updated · CNN · Aug 29
Summary
Henry Williams and David Oks, the former “Gravel Teens,” said they have joined OpenAI’s Strategic Futures team to help prepare the world for transformative AI and reduce risks from misaligned superintelligence.
Dean W. Ball, a former Trump AI policy adviser who leads the team, said he hired them as a duo for long-range work on the political economy and political theory of superintelligence and other highly capable AI systems.
The move marks a sharp turn for the pair, who rose in 2019 running ex-senator Mike Gravel’s anti-establishment campaign and later built the progressive Gravel Institute before it collapsed after layoffs in 2022 and shut down in 2023.
After that closure, both moved deeper into Silicon Valley—working at Andreessen Horowitz in 2025—and embraced a more optimistic AI line even as OpenAI and Anthropic executives have shifted from mass-job-loss warnings toward a human-AI coexistence message.
OpenAI’s hiring of politically eclectic figures like Williams and Oks reflects a broader push by AI firms to add writers and policy thinkers alongside engineers as they try to shape the public narrative around AI’s economic and social impact.