The former UK chancellor George Osborne is joining OpenAI to lead the ChatGPT developer’s relationships with governments around the world.
He will head a division known internally as OpenAI for Countries, through which the San Francisco artificial intelligence startup works with governments on national-level AI rollouts.
The former Conservative politician will add the role to his growing portfolio of positions which include: chair of the British Museum; adviser to the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase; and host of a podcast with the former Labour minister Ed Balls.
Osborne is moving on from his role as senior managing director at Evercore, which acquired the investment bank Robey Warshaw in July where he was partner, and will be based in London rather than Silicon Valley.
His hiring by OpenAI is the latest sign the big US tech firms are becoming increasingly focused on boosting AI adoption by national governments.
Microsoft, Google and Palantir have all been pushing hard to provide AI services to the British government, where Osborne was in office from 2010 to 2016 alongside Nick Clegg, who spent seven years working for Mark Zuckerberg at Meta.
Rishi Sunak, one of Osborne’s successors as chancellor, announced in October he was taking an advisory role with one of OpenAI’s main rivals, Anthropic.
Other roles Osborne has held since leaving government have included being editor of the Evening Standard between 2017 and 2020, and adviser to the US private equity firm BlackRock.
OpenAI’s national-level projects have included involvement in building major AI infrastructure in places such as Norway and the United Arab Emirates as part of a $500bn “Stargate” datacentre initiative.
OpenAI already has a memorandum of understanding with the UK government “to establish strategic partnerships that accelerate AI-driven economic growth and deliver opportunities to materially improve people’s lives” and a deal with Estonia to give all pupils and teachers access to a version of ChatGPT.
Osborne will be expected to create new nation-level AI infrastructure partnerships and expand those already announced in Argentina, Australia, Germany and South Korea.
In a statement marking his appointment, Osborne said he believed OpenAI, which has been valued at about $500bn, was “the most exciting and promising company in the world right now”.
“In my conversations with Sam Altman, Brad Lightcap [OpenAI’s chief executive and chief operating officer] and other senior colleagues, it’s clear they are exceptionally impressive leaders and that they care very deeply about their mission to ensure the power of artificial intelligence is developed responsibly, and the benefits are felt by all,” he said.
“That’s exactly what the OpenAI for Countries initiative intends to achieve, helping societies around the world share the opportunity this powerful technology brings.”
OpenAI has been hit by recent controversies over the impact of its chatbots. It is defending several lawsuits from the families of young people who took their own lives after interacting with ChatGPT. They include the family of Adam Raine, 16, who killed himself in April after what his family’s lawyer claimed was “months of encouragement from ChatGPT”.
Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, said Osborne’s appointment “reflects a shared belief that AI is becoming critical infrastructure – and early decisions about how it’s built, governed, and deployed will shape economics and geopolitics for years to come”.
He added: “Whether the world builds on democratic AI rails led by nations with aligned values designed to put this technology into the hands of people so they can fully participate in the opportunities of the intelligence age or the People’s Republic of China-imposed autocratic AI rails that will be used to concentrate the technology in the hands of the few – and at the expense of the many – will define what kind of a world we live in.”
