Former head of the NSA joins OpenAI board of directors

But don't worry those are one way mirrors

No reasons to be concerned, citizen. The former head of the largest surveillance agency in the world just joined as a C-level member to the largest data scraping company in the world

It's a bit of a non-story, beyond basic press release fodder.

In addition to it's role as "digital panopticon", they also have a legitimate role in cyber security assurance, and they're perfectly good at it. The guy in question was the head of both the worlds largest surveillance entity, but also the world's largest cyber security entity.
Opinions on the organization aside, that's solid experience managing a security organization.
If open AI wants to make the case that they take security seriously, former head of the NSA, Cyber command and central security service as well as department director at a university and trustee at another university who has a couple masters degrees isn't a bad way to try to send that message.

Other comments said open AI is the biggest scraping entity on the planet, but that pretty handily goes to Google, or more likely to the actual NSA, given the whole "digital panopticon" thing and "Google can't fisa warrant the phone company".

Joining boards so they can write memos to the CEO/dean/regent/chancellor is just what former high ranking government people do. The job aggressively selects for overactive Leslie Knope types who can't sit still and feel the need to keep contributing, for good or bad, in whatever way they think is important.

If the US wanted to influence open AI in some way, they'd just pay them. The Feds budget is big enough that bigger companies will absolutely prostrate themselves for a sample of it. Or if they just wanted influence, they'd... pay them.
They wouldn't do anything weird with retired or "retired" officers when a pile of money is much easier and less ambiguous.

At worst it's open AI trying to buy some access to the security apparatus to get contracts. Seems less likely to me, since I don't actually think they have anything valuable for that sector.

Timothy D. Haugh is the current head. Nakasone is the former director of the NSA.

Or maybe just the ones with interesting connotations behind them, like this one.