White House upset with Sam Altman's OpenAI over hiring of 'supreme village idiot'

OpenAI has picked up a new problem in Washington, and it arrived in the form of a single hire. Senior Trump administration officials say Sam Altman's company put its standing with the government at risk when it brought on Dean Ball as head of strategic futures, according to a New York Post report published Monday. Ball is the same policy hand the Pentagon's AI chief, Emil Michael, publicly wrote off as the AI world's "supreme village idiot."The friction is not new, but the job title made it louder. Three White House officials, speaking to the Post anonymously, described Ball as a junior-to-mid-level policy analyst whose suggestions were routinely passed over, and said he never held a security clearance. That matters because Ball's own website credits him as the primary staff drafter of America's AI Action Plan.