Former UK chancellor George Osborne finds something to do at OpenAI

Follows Nick Clegg at Meta and Rishi Sunak at Anthropic in snuggling up to US tech

OpenAI has hired former UK finance minister George Osborne, continuing a trend of British politicians whose careers have peaked cozying up to US tech giants.

Osborne, who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2016 under Prime Minister David Cameron, announced the move on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, saying he will work as managing director and head of OpenAI for Countries while based in London.

He follows the lead of Nick Clegg, the former Liberal Democrat leader and deputy PM under Cameron's coalition government, who did a stint as chief apologist for Facebook parent company Meta between 2018 and 2025, and former PM Rishi Sunak, who has taken up advisory roles with both Microsoft and AI biz Anthropic.

OpenAI for Countries is an effort to export the company's Stargate project to other nations beyond the US. Stargate itself is an ambitious plan to somehow raise and invest $500 billion over the next four years to build infrastructure to power AI in America, which kicked off last year as a union between the AI developer and Microsoft.

Announcing OpenAI for Countries in May, the biz claimed it had "heard from many countries asking for help in building out similar AI infrastructure," and that they "want their own Stargates and similar projects."

Osborne said in the post announcing his appointment: "I recently asked myself the question: what's the most exciting and promising company in the world right now? The answer I believe is OpenAI."

"In my conversations with Sam Altman, Brad Lightcap, and other senior colleagues, it's clear they are exceptionally impressive leaders and that they care very deeply about their mission to ensure the power of artificial intelligence is developed responsibly, and the benefits are felt by all," he added.

Osborne's legacy as Chancellor of the Exchequer is that his austerity policies following the financial crisis of 2007-2008 introduced tax rises and harsh spending cuts that were blamed for delaying Britain's economic recovery and damaging public services, while failing to deliver on the goal of reducing the country's budget deficit.

After this, he served as editor of London newspaper The Evening Standard during a period that saw its continued financial decline, so it is easy to see why OpenAI decided he is a safe pair of hands for its international expansion.

However, concerns have already been raised over OpenAI's finances, with HSBC warning that the business would need to secure $207 billion in new financing by 2030 to support its expansion plans, yet isn't expected to turn a profit before then.

The company has also announced a number of circular deals with other tech businesses, in which they agree to invest in OpenAI and it in turn agrees to invest some or all of the cash back into procuring products or services from them.

In September, for example, GPU maker Nvidia said it would hand OpenAI up to $100 billion in investment, while the ChatGPT creator agreed to buy "at least 10 gigawatts" of Nvidia systems for its datacenters.

Then, in October, AMD announced it had issued OpenAI with a warrant for up to 160 million shares of the chip company's common stock, in exchange for "6 gigawatts" of AMD GPUs to help drive AI model development.

OpenAI – along with other AI firms – has also been involved in controversy over allegations that it used copyrighted material to train its models without gaining permission from the rights holders.

Publisher O'Reilly claimed that content from its books had been used to train some OpenAI models. OpenAI even asked the US government to ensure it had access to any data it wanted to train models, and to block foreign countries from trying to enforce copyright rules against it. ®