The viral leftist teens of Campaign 2020 work for OpenAI now

From Gravel’s Twitter Feed to OpenAI’s Futures Lab: The Teens Who Wanted to Change Politics Now Want to Shape AI

Goldlaner.com – In a move that would have seemed almost satirical just a few years ago, two young men who once commandeered a retired senator’s social media accounts to deliver scathing critiques of American wealth inequality have accepted positions at one of the world’s most powerful artificial-intelligence companies. Henry Williams and David Oks — the pair widely remembered as the “Gravel Teens” — announced on X that they are joining OpenAI’s Strategic Futures team, a unit tasked with anticipating how transformative machine-intelligence systems will reshape economies, labor markets, and daily life.

The announcement lands with particular irony. Seven years earlier, the same two teenagers had recruited Alaska’s long-retired senator Mike Gravel, then 89, to lend his name and decades of political credibility to a deliberately unserious outsider campaign. Their goal was never to win the presidency. It was to expose what they saw as the hollow, focus-grouped language of centrist Democratic politics and to give voice to a younger generation’s frustration with entrenched corporate power. The stunt became an internet sensation, channeling the sardonic, anti-establishment energy of left-wing podcasts and Twitter threads through the persona of a man old enough to have helped expose the Pentagon Papers.

The Original Stunt and Its Rhetorical Arsenal

The campaign’s signature moment arrived on May 25, 2019, when Gravel’s Twitter account posted: “The wealthiest 10% of Americans control 70% of the nation’s total wealth – and almost everyone telling you inequality doesn’t ‘really matter’ comes from that bracket.” Gravel did not write the line. Williams and Oks did, along with a full slate of progressive policy proposals published on a dedicated campaign website.

Their tone borrowed heavily from the vocabulary of left-leaning media ecosystems — the irony-laced, often disaffected register of podcasts such as “Chapo Trap House” and the broader lefty Twitter sphere. One May 2019 post aimed its barbs at the Democratic establishment:

“[I]f you want a vision of the future under Cory Booker, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever. and every once in a while it stops for an inspirational lecture on how we should never stop dreaming.”

Yet beneath the provocation, the pair insisted on a genuine reformist impulse. Williams told the New York Times in 2019 that the cathartic humor of shows like “Chapo Trap House” left him unsatisfied:

“‘Chapo Trap House’ is great catharsis. But it doesn’t make me happy. It doesn’t make me feel like anything can change.”

After the Campaign: The Gravel Institute

When Gravel’s candidacy wound down, Oks, Williams, and their friend Henry Magowan founded the Gravel Institute, a nonprofit designed to function as a progressive counterweight to conservative educational platforms such as PragerU. The institute produced video content featuring figures like former labor secretary Robert Reich, who dissected common misconceptions around minimum-wage economics, and Matt Bruenig, founder of the People’s Policy Project, who examined the relationship between oil-company profits and consumer fuel prices. The channel amassed several hundred thousand YouTube subscribers and sustained itself through recurring financial support from viewers.

Inside OpenAI’s Strategic Futures

Their new role places Williams and Oks under the supervision of Dean W. Ball, a former AI policy adviser to President Donald Trump and a longtime fixture of right-wing think-tank circles. Ball framed the unit’s mission in broad, almost philosophical terms:

“think about the long-range political economy and political theory outcomes from technologies like super intelligence and highly capable AI systems.”

Ball said he hired the pair specifically as a duo, citing their combined strengths in writing and editorial judgment:

“I think David and Henry are a fantastically capable pair of writer and editor. I had some conversations with them that made me really excited, and thus far, it’s played out wonderfully. They have hit the ground running. They are dedicated, and they care quite a lot about what they’re doing.”

The hiring decision sits within a wider trend. AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic are recruiting writers, philosophers, ethicists, and physicists alongside their core engineering and research staffs, at a pace that mirrors the speed at which they ingest rare books and datasets. Ball dismissed any concern about ideological mismatch:

“I hire smart people, that’s what it comes down to. I hire the right people for the job. I don’t care about their politics.”

Why the Pivot Matters

The trajectory from progressive gadflies to employees of a company valued at more than $850 billion raises questions that extend well beyond one hiring decision. In 2025, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman predicted that certain categories of work — customer service among them — would be “totally, totally gone” thanks to advancing AI capabilities. Williams and Oks will now help shape the institutional and political frameworks meant to manage that transition, working under a conservative policy veteran while representing a company whose stated goal includes fundamentally restructuring labor and everyday life.

For observers of American political culture, the episode underscores how quickly the boundaries between activist critique and corporate strategy have blurred. The same generation that once mocked the Democratic establishment for its bland technocratic optimism now sits inside the very institutions whose outputs will determine whether that optimism becomes a blueprint or a warning. Whether their presence inside OpenAI’s futures planning will temper, redirect, or simply annotate the company’s trajectory remains to be seen. What is clear is that the conversation about who gets to define the political economy of superintelligence now includes voices that, seven years ago, were telling a retired senator to tweet about wealth concentration.

Oks and Williams responded to questions through an OpenAI spokesperson. Magowan did not respond to multiple requests for comment.