OpenAI has appointed Jill Hazelbaker, the president of Uber, as its chief corporate affairs officer, filling a leadership post that has stood vacant for about ten months. The company announced the hire on 3 November, saying Hazelbaker will lead its global communications and corporate positioning and report to president and co-founder Greg Brockman. She starts in early December and will stay based on the East Coast while spending time in San Francisco. The appointment lands as OpenAI fights political opposition to its data-centre buildout and prepares for a possible public listing in 2027.
A decade at Uber
Hazelbaker joined Uber in November 2015 as vice president of policy and communications, and spent about eleven years there as her remit widened across marketing, public policy, safety, and people teams. She became president and chief corporate affairs officer in May 2026, also overseeing human resources, recruiting, and real estate.
OpenAI described her as central to shaping Uber’s reputation through its transformation from an ambitious startup into one of the world’s largest technology platforms. Before Uber, she led communications and public policy at Snap and held senior roles at Google, including corporate communications globally and government relations in Europe.
The post she fills has been empty since chief communications officer Hannah Wong left in January, with Chris Lehane leading the team on an interim basis. The vacancy matters because the job is no longer just press relations: its holder must defend data-centre sites, answer regulators, and explain a company serving more than a billion people a week.
Why the hire lands now
OpenAI’s need for a public-trust chief has sharpened in the past week. Voters backed limits on data centres in nearly every local ballot measure they faced, and chief financial officer Sarah Friar spent Friday arguing that the midterm sweep changes nothing about the buildout.
The company has answered the backlash with pledges, publishing a National Community Compact that promises to pay the full cost of the power its future campuses use and to stop asking public officials to sign non-disclosure agreements. Those are promises Hazelbaker will now have to sell, town by town, to the communities hosting the sites.
Our read
The hire is best read as OpenAI buying the one skill its engineers cannot ship: permission. Hazelbaker spent a decade winning regulatory fights city by city for Uber, a company that entered markets first and negotiated afterwards. OpenAI’s data-centre programme now faces the same fight in reverse, asking towns to accept giant facilities before a single job arrives.
That experience is also the risk. Uber’s playbook treated opposition as a communications problem to be outmanoeuvred, and it left a trail of bruised regulators and court cases. Hazelbaker’s test will be whether she repeats that approach or learns from it, because a data centre cannot move to the next town the way a ride-hailing app could.
The timing also ties the hire to the listing. OpenAI’s president has said the company could be ready to go public in 2027, and a chief corporate affairs officer must make a loss-making, power-hungry builder look like a trustworthy public company. Hazelbaker starts in early December, giving her a year to build that case before any prospectus appears.
Why It Matters
For OpenAI’s users, the hire signals where the company’s hardest problems now sit: not in the model, but in the politics around it. The next year of its growth will be decided as much in council meetings and statehouses as in benchmarks, and the person arguing its case there is now a veteran of exactly those fights.
For the wider industry, the move sets a pattern. The labs are hiring political operators as fast as they hire researchers, because the binding constraint on AI growth has shifted from chips and talent to land, power, and public consent. Whoever wins those arguments fastest will build fastest.
Background
Hazelbaker began her career in United States politics, serving as national communications director for Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and as press secretary to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. She joined OpenAI in a busy stretch for the company, which has closed the first part of a major funding round and hired Claude Code’s product lead from Anthropic.
Source: OpenAI’s announcement and PYMNTS’ report
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