With months to go before its IPO, OpenAI isn't just recruiting capital - it's recruiting people known to both markets and politicians. The two latest names on its list say it all.

Noam Shazeer is one of the authors of the legendary 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need" - the blueprint on which the transformer architecture was built, and with it the entire current generation of artificial intelligence. Shazeer spent 26 years at Google, left to found Character AI, and then Google bought Character AI for $2.7 billion. Is he now returning to Google DeepMind? No - he's going to OpenAI. Small moves of enormous sums of money, a typical picture of today's AI talent market.

Dane Stuckey is a former official of the Trump administration who worked on the "American Action Plan for Artificial Intelligence." He will now lead a new team for "strategic futures" at OpenAI - catastrophic risks, recursive self-improvement, AI's impact on jobs, and - you don't have to be a cynic to notice it - government relations. He starts on July 6.

The combination is deliberate. Shazeer is the scientific legitimacy. Stuckey is the political access. OpenAI is going public and it needs both. Rival Anthropic, meanwhile, has faced US government restrictions on its models - OpenAI, with Stuckey on the team, is clearly positioning itself on the other side of that political line.

Is this good or bad for AI globally? Hard to judge. But it's certain: a company that claims to be building "for the benefit of humanity" is now actively recruiting people who know how to move through the corridors of power. That's normal for any company going public. Just don't forget it the next time OpenAI talks about its "mission."