Sam Altman's OpenAI Hires Chuck Schumer's Daughter to Influence State-Level AI Policies

OpenAI is growing its global affairs team with three new hires focused on state-level AI policy, including Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer’s daughter.

Axios reports that the three additions bring a mix of party ties and tech industry résumés. Jessica Schumer, the daughter of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) will oversee policy and partnerships across the Northeast. She previously ran Amazon’s public policy work in New York and served as chief of staff at the Council of Economic Advisers under the Obama administration.

Caulder Harvill-Childs takes on state-level policy and partnerships across the Southeast. He most recently managed public policy for Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and is a Republican policy veteran who worked for Georgia House Speaker Jon Burns.

Thomas MacLellan will lead OpenAI’s state cyber defense policy work. He has more than twenty years in cyber and public policy, with stints at Palo Alto Networks, Symantec, FireEye and the National Governors Association.

The timing isn’t an accident. Bipartisan efforts to regulate AI are picking up across state legislatures, and a steady drumbeat of cybersecurity incidents keeps pushing lawmakers to act. OpenAI’s top lobbyist, Chris Lehane, has described the company’s approach as “reverse federalism,” in which large, powerful states adopt similar rules that add up to a de facto national standard. The idea is to work around Congress’ inability to pass tech legislation, even as individual states push ahead with their own laws.

Despite OpenAI’s hiring spree on the political front, the company has suffered high-profile losses from its executive leadership. Breitbart News previously reported on Sam Altman’s AI talent exodus:

Chris Malone joined OpenAI in March 2025, shortly after the company announced Stargate, its data-center venture with Oracle and SoftBank. That project had a rocky start. OpenAI shifted toward leasing computing power from cloud providers instead of building facilities itself, then reversed course again: it’s now reviving its internal data-center efforts, this time leasing entire facilities rather than renting chips from cloud providers. Malone was evidently not leading that push.

His exit adds to a string of high-level departures at OpenAI, including Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser, Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap, and Fidji Simo, who served as second-in-command to Chief Executive Sam Altman. The departures come as OpenAI works toward an initial public offering expected in 2027 and races to catch up with rival Anthropic in sales to business customers.

AI giants continue to influence politics at all levels of government, from the DOJ’s position on copyright to local governments negotiating data center contracts in secret. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.