The viral leftist teens of Campaign 2020 work for OpenAI now

By T.M. Brown, CNN

(CNN) — On May 25, 2019, the Twitter account belonging to the long-retired Alaska senator Mike Gravel 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, who had just turned 89, didn’t write the post himself. It was the work of a pair of teenagers, Henry Williams and David Oks, who had recruited Gravel to lend his name and his online presence to an outsider, leftist presidential campaign — a stunt that became an internet phenomenon, channeling youthful 21st century anti-establishment messages through the persona of someone old enough to have helped expose the Pentagon Papers.

This month, Williams and Oks posted a different set of messages on X: they announced they were going to work on OpenAI’s Strategic Futures team “to help prepare the world for transformative AI,” as Oks put it.

Seven years after denouncing the destructive effects of inequality and runaway corporate power, the duo formerly known as the “Gravel Teens” has signed on with a Silicon Valley behemoth with a valuation of more than $850 billion and a goal of fundamentally upending labor and everyday life. In 2025, OpenAI’s billionaire co-founder, Sam Altman, predicted that AI technology meant that certain types of jobs like customer service will be “totally, totally gone.”

Williams and Oks will be working, they wrote, under Dean W. Ball, a former AI policy adviser to President Donald Trump and a veteran of the right-wing think-tank world. Ball described Strategic Futures as a place where his team would “think about the long-range political economy and political theory outcomes from technologies like super intelligence and highly capable AI systems.”

Ball said he was impressed with Oks’ and Williams’ analytical acumen, and hired them specifically as a duo.

“I think David and Henry are a fantastically capable pair of writer and editor,” Ball said. “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.”

How did progressive gadflies go from attempting to push mainstream Democratic politics to the left to joining a polarizing AI company under the guidance of a dyed-in-the-wool conservative like Ball? Alongside a small army of software engineers and researchers, AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring writers, philosophers, ethicists and physicists at the same speed they’re ingesting rare books. “I hire smart people, that’s what it comes down to. I hire the right people for the job,” Ball said. “I don’t care about their politics.”

The Gravel Teens originally grabbed attention by taking over Gravel’s social media accounts and creating a campaign website with a detailed slate of progressive policy proposals. The effort was never meant to compete for the presidency, they said, but rather to pillory what they saw as the ineffective, focus-grouped messaging beloved by centrist Democrats and to channel the frustration many on the left had into something approaching real change.

They used the irony-soaked and often disaffected language of lefty Twitter and podcasts like “Chapo Trap House” to try and embarrass mainstream politicians. “[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,” one post from May 2019 read.

But they also spoke of their earnest desire to make the world better. “‘Chapo Trap House’ is great catharsis. But it doesn’t make me happy. It doesn’t make me feel like anything can change,” Williams told the New York Times in 2019.

When Gravel’s candidacy ended, Oks, Williams and their friend Henry Magowan set up the Gravel Institute, a nonprofit meant to serve as a counterweight to conservative educational sites like PragerU. The Gravel Institute created videos hosted by a lineup of progressive figures like former labor secretary Robert Reich, who discussed the myths of the minimum wage discourse, and People’s Policy Project founder Matt Bruenig, who talked about oil company profits and gas prices. (Oks and Williams provided written responses through an OpenAI spokesperson. Magowan did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Despite several hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube, recurring financial support from Patreon subscribers and a full production studio in Brooklyn, the Gravel Institute was short-lived. Several left-wing luminaries the institute had touted as speakers, including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Cornel West, never appeared in any videos.

Tymon Brown, the Gravel Institute’s head of production, said that the nonprofit’s dissolution was never explained to him or the rest of the organization. He said the institute fired its entire staff save for one animator in April of 2022; the last video posted on its YouTube page is from August 2022. “We were still paying the rent for the studio, but over the course of a weekend it went from everything feeling lush to, all of a sudden, things are dire and they decided to lay everybody off,” he said.

“They caught lightning in a bottle with this political campaign and then this media company,” said Alex Dooley, who says he worked with Oks and Williams on both the presidential campaign and the Gravel Institute. “But then they had their eyes opened to where the real power in the world was and they followed the money. Institutional venture capital investors have a lot more of it than poor leftists.”

When asked about the Gravel Institute’s abrupt closure, as well as accusations of hypocrisy and their motives, Oks and Williams said in a joint statement that “We have always acted from earnest conviction and our best estimation of how we could better the world. It has become clear that contributing to mitigating the risk of misaligned superintelligence and ensuring transformative AI benefits all of humanity is the most valuable work that we can do towards that end.”

Brown said that Williams and Oks ignored requests for payment from people who had done work for the institute before they officially shuttered operations in the summer of 2023. According to financial records, the institute continued receiving donations via the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue until September 2024. Oks and Williams, through an OpenAI spokesperson, denied withholding vendor payments and said the organization had stopped collecting donations when operations stopped.

“I got the sense that they enjoyed feeling like they were at the vanguard of something,” Brown said, “that they enjoyed being able to become educated in something, and they were willing to do the work as long as it didn’t spook them.”

Nathan Tankus, a journalist and economics commentator who founded the media company Notes on the Crises, became friends with Oks and Williams in their Gravel era. “The politics of the Gravel Institute was itself a partially ironic performance for them,” he said. “So getting rid of it didn’t cost them anything they valued.”

After the Gravel Institute closed, both Oks and Williams entrenched themselves in business and, eventually, Silicon Valley. After graduating from Columbia University, Williams worked at the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland and an AI startup in San Francisco. He was also a fellow at Interact, a nonprofit aimed at connecting “young technologists” to the wider tech industry. As late as January 2023, Williams’ LinkedIn page was headlined by his work at the Gravel Institute. By 2025, his profile did not mention the nonprofit or his work there.

Oks, who attended Oxford University, worked for a hedge fund and became a journalist and writer. In 2022, he started writing for a San Francisco-based outlet called Palladium and eventually became a correspondent. Palladium is a quarterly publication whose founders were active in online neo-reactionary circles.

In 2025, Oks and Williams both joined the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as “a16z.” It’s one of Silicon Valley’s most influential institutions, and in recent years the firm’s billionaire co-founder, Marc Andreessen, has become a powerful voice in reactionary politics.

In 2023, Andreessen wrote what he called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” which argued in favor of tech advancing as fast as possible with minimal intervention from the government. “We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns,” he wrote. “To ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.”

“Effective accelerationism”— known in tech circles as “e/acc”— is a popular concept among tech promoters like Andreessen, who think that advanced AI models will unleash a new utopian epoch and that therefore the only morally acceptable mission is to make it happen as soon as possible.

Andreessen also has crusaded against what he considered liberal suppression of social media activity, including Twitter’s ban of Donald Trump after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, which he called “illegal censorship” after Trump’s 2024 election win. Back in 2021, when Twitter removed Trump’s account, the Gravel account posted, “You can believe both that tech companies have far too much power and that Trump getting banned is a very good thing.”

Oks and Williams joined a16z’s New Media team in 2025. A16z New Media is an organization that bills itself as “a single place where founders acquire the legitimacy, taste, brandbuilding [sic], expertise, and momentum they need to win the narrative battle online.”

Both Williams and Oks seem to share their employers’ enthusiasm for the transformative power of AI. In a Substack post from February titled “Why I’m not worried about AI job loss,” Oks wrote that he believes AI “will end up being at least as important as the discovery of electricity or the steam engine, and there’s a good chance it’s the most important thing that humans ever invent” but that the “actual impacts of AI in the real world will be a lot slower and more uneven” than its doomiest prophets seem to think. “Even in the outsourced customer service sector, the lowest-hanging fruit on the automation tree, we’re just not yet seeing mass layoffs due to AI,” Oks wrote. (Bloomberg reported last month that there have been widespread customer service center layoffs due to AI.)

Oks was also upbeat about the current “cyborg” era of work, where humans and AI tools are supposed to work in tandem to boost productivity.

It’s an argument for AI as an empowering, rather than destructive, force — a pivot the industry has taken this year after previously hyping its technology’s ability to bring about apocalyptic levels of disruption. Along with Altman’s predictions that AI would wipe out sectors of employment, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios in May 2025 that AI had the potential to destroy 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs and increase unemployment to 20%.

In recent months, Altman and Amodei have offered more measured rhetoric about the impact that AI will have on the labor force. Altman even went so far as to say he was “pretty wrong on the social and economic implications” in a May 2026 interview with a bank CEO. Instead, both men have focused on rehabilitating AI’s image into something that exists in harmony with humanity. Hiring figures like Oks and Williams, then, is an attempt to project a more optimistic vision of AI’s future that transcends political affiliations, according to Ball.

“I don’t think that our current political map, our current political dividing lines in partisan American politics bolt on very well to AI at all,” Ball said. “I think the politics of AI are not going to fall along traditional partisan lines, or might create new types of dividing lines.”

But where Ball sees the advent of AI as something bigger than politics, Tankus sees two young men with more personal ambitions. He said that Williams and Oks remind him of the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s idea that the neoliberal world order has created the “entrepreneur of the self” where people are more likely to act like businesses than members of society.

“People are just supposed to shape themselves to the needs of the market and David and Henry have done that very well,” he said. “But the ‘market’ is just a contrived symbol in this dance; what we’re really talking about is shaping themselves to the needs of power.”

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