OpenAI Hires Three State Policy Directors

OpenAI has added three directors specializing in U.S. state policy to its global affairs team, covering the Northeast, Southeast, and cybersecurity.

Jessica Schumer will be responsible for Northeast policy and partnerships. She is the daughter of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, previously served as chief of staff for the Council of Economic Advisers under the Obama administration, and most recently worked on public policy for Amazon in New York. The company emphasizes that these hires bring bipartisan backgrounds and industry experience.

Caulder Harvill-Childs will oversee Southeast state policy and partnerships. He recently left a public policy position at Meta and previously worked for Republican Georgia House Speaker Jon Burns, being positioned as a Republican policy veteran to facilitate connections with Southern state legislatures and governors' offices.

Thomas MacLellan is responsible for state-level cybersecurity policy. He has over twenty years of experience in cybersecurity and public policy, with a background at Palo Alto Networks, Symantec, FireEye, and the National Governors Association, addressing the rising legislative focus on cybersecurity and critical infrastructure in various states.

The company refers to this strategy as reverse federalism: rather than waiting for Congress to enact a uniform federal law, it aims to first promote similar cutting-edge AI safety regulations in large states like California and New York, then replicate that framework in other states, effectively creating a national standard. Publicly, it states that California, New York, and Illinois have begun to align on safety frameworks, incident reporting, and accountability audits.

The lobbying is led by global affairs head Chris Lehane. California and New York's transparency legislation has been successfully influenced by OpenAI, with Illinois subsequently adopting independent third-party audit requirements. The three new hires will immediately engage with the accelerating wave of state legislation, particularly in states where cybersecurity issues are repeatedly raising alarms.

In market mechanisms, this is an event-driven regulatory bidding, not secondary market trading. OpenAI invests political capital in large states that can set rules, exchanging executable, aligned state laws for predictable compliance costs; Anthropic is pushing for stricter texts in the same arena. Beneficiaries are leading labs that can codify their security disclosure templates into state law, while smaller developers struggle to comply with fifty different sets of rules, and Congress remains stuck in debates over federal preemption.

Source: Public Information