OpenAI Hires Top Trump AI Official to Work on National Security

OpenAI is continuing to fill out its leadership bench with former Trump administration officials.

Thomas Lind, who previously led AI policy at the Office of the National Cyber Director, joined OpenAI this week, an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed. ONCD is a key office within the White House that played a leading role in putting together a June executive order on AI.

Lind will lead cyber and strategic risk on OpenAI’s national security policy team, which is led by Sasha Baker, the former deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in the Biden administration.

OpenAI and its executives have been stepping up efforts to strengthen the company’s ties to the Trump administration. In July, it hired Dean Ball, who previously worked in the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy and helped draft the administration’s July 2025 AI Action Plan. Last year, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife Anna donated $25 million to Donald Trump’s super PAC.

Lind’s hire comes at a critical juncture for AI regulation. Recent incidents involving rogue AI, including a swarm of OpenAI agents hacking into the open source repository Hugging Face, have led to calls for new laws from policymakers and safety groups. The Trump administration has resisted efforts to establish new regulation, though November’s midterm elections could bring further legislative and oversight efforts if the Democrats take control of either Congressional chamber.

Lind’s former agency, ONCD, was at the center of the Trump administration’s efforts to wrangle AI policy. The office had been working on a cybersecurity-related executive order on AI before Anthropic announced its latest model Mythos last April, which the company did not release to the public because of safety concerns. The planned order evolved to deal with the new threats posed by cyber models, The Information previously reported.

Formally signed by Trump in June after a tumultuous back-and-forth process between AI companies and different factions within the administration, the executive order established a voluntary framework for AI developers to submit their models for government review before releasing them to the public. The framework went into effect in early August, though it has been widely criticized for a lack of transparency after the White House declined to release it publicly, as well as continued uncertainty over whether it will include open-source model providers.

As the White House continues to grapple with how much AI oversight it wants to perform, ONCD remains at the center of key decision-making around the framework’s implementation. That includes the framework’s trusted partner program, which establishes the organizations that get early access to advanced AI models after they go through government review.

Lind left ONCD in June, according to his LinkedIn. He had joined the office in April 2025 as the senior director for intelligence, becoming the head of policy a year later. He previously worked as an intelligence officer in the National Security Agency.

OpenAI continues to invest heavily in cyber efforts. In August, OpenAI’s Brockman released a blog post arguing that the Hugging Face incident was a “watershed moment” for cybersecurity. Later that month, the company led an open letter calling on organizations and governments to bolster their cyber defense efforts. In September, the company committed $1 billion for its “Daybreak for Frontline Defenders” initiative to subsidize access to its frontier models and provide technical assistance.

“Tom is a key addition to our national security team, bringing expertise across AI policy, cybersecurity, and strategic risk,” OpenAI’s Baker said in a statement. “His hire reflects OpenAI’s continued investment in addressing the national security challenges of increasingly capable AI and ensuring this technology is used to benefit and protect the country. His 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.”

Leo Schwartz is a reporter covering the intersection of tech and politics. He can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at leomschwartz.24