Articles by Dean Ball
On the Loose - By Dean W. Ball
*How the Galliano Show at the Met Fell Apart* *Anna Wintour put her full power and prestige behind a designer convicted of an antisemitic hate cri...
Anthropic 发布 Fable 5 和 Mythos 5 模型，被指采用隐蔽安全政策引发透明度与竞争争议
一如既往，Anthropic还发布了厚厚的系统卡，这次长达319页，披露了一套更复杂、更隐蔽的安全安排：同一代模型能力，被拆分成不同可访问版本；更少受限的Mythos 5只开放给少数可信伙伴；面向公众和企业客户的Fable 5，则在网络安全、生物化学、模型蒸馏、前沿AI研发等领域设置了不同层级的限制。 其中一部分限制是可见的。比如，当用户提出高风险网络安全、生物化学或模型蒸馏相关请求时，系统可能触发安全分类器，把请求回退给能力较弱的模型，并告知用户发生了回退。这种做法虽然会影响体验，但至少逻辑清楚，Anthropic认为这些任务风险较高，所以不提供完整能力，或者只提供较弱模型的回答。 真正的问题出在另一部分，对于“前沿LLM开发”相关请求，Anthropic没有采用公开拒答，也没有明确告诉用户模型被降级，而是通过提示词修改（prompt modification）、引导向量（steering vectors）、参数高效微调（PEFT）等方式，在用户不可见的情况下限制模型的有效性。也就是说，用户以为自己正在调用最强的Claude，得到的却可能是被安全层暗中改写、削弱或引导后的回答。...
Scaling Laws, Rapid Response: An "FDA for AI" at the White House?, with Dean Ball
Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Research Director at Lawfare, and Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and Senior Editor at Lawfare, spoke with Dean Ball, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and former Senior Policy Advisor for AI at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, about the Trump administration's reported plans to vet frontier AI models before public...
Kicking the Tires: A Voluntary Path to Pre-deployment AI Vetting
The Trump administration is weighing the creation of a “review system” for frontier AI models. According to the New York Times, in this proposed approach, AI labs would provide the federal government with “first access” to “get ahead” of models with significant cyber capabilities, presumably such as Anthropic’s Mythos.
Aviate, Navigate, Communicate
Dear readers, I have exciting news: I am writing a book! It is currently untitled and will be published next year by Penguin Press. The book will be a work of political theory just as much as it will be a book about AI. I cannot wait to tell you more about it. All I can say is that it is the most ambitious project I’ve ever undertaken, and an effort to answer—tentatively—questions I first asked here.
A.I. Is a National Security Risk. We Aren’t Doing Nearly Enough.
A.I. Is a National Security Risk. We Aren’t Doing Nearly Enough. May 4, 2026, 5:01 a.m. ET Credit...Sebastian König By Dean Ball and Ben Buchanan Mr. Ball was the senior policy adviser for artificial intelligence and emerging technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in 2025. Dr. Buchanan served as the White House special adviser for A.I. during the Biden administration.
No to laissez-faire on AI, yes to a light touch
Anthropic, a frontier AI company, revealed recently that it had trained a large language model called Mythos. Unlike almost all similar announcements from AI firms, this wasn’t a product release. Anthropic—a developer known for its focus on safety—claims the model is too dangerous to be made generally available because of a significant leap in its hacking abilities. Mythos, the firm says, could knock out software systems that power plants, banks and even armed forces rely on every day.
The Coming AI Superstorm
Editor’s Note: This essay was previously published on Dean Ball’s Substack, Hyperdimensional, and is reprinted with permission. I stumbled recently on a painting I once loved as a young boy but had long since forgotten. The Girl I Left Behind Me, painted by Eastman Johnson around 1872, depicts a young girl facing a storm. The wind blows her hair and dress straight back, yet she leans into it. She holds her little books to her chest for protection and plants her foot defiantly down.
The Pentagon-Anthropic dispute is a test of control
The writer is a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and was lead staff writer of the Trump administration’s AI Action...
How to Write the AI Action Plan
When I started this series a couple years ago, the idea was more constrained than it is today. We wanted to do exit interviews with civil servants, people who were newly free to speak about their experiences and their learnings. The project has expanded: we talk to political scientists, economists, DC wonks, elected officials and people currently in government.
How state AI regulations threaten innovation, free speech, and knowledge creation
Picture a world where, rather than simply punishing a bigot for discriminating against a couple on the basis of race, the authorities target the local library instead. See, when they did an investigation, the authorities noticed the bigot had checked out a number of books that clearly inspired and informed his actions. As a result, they decided the library must be punished for providing them.
Life, Liberty, and Superintelligence
If you have paid attention to artificial intelligence at all in the past two years, there is a good chance that you have heard more about its risks than its benefits. Some believe you should be worried about existential or catastrophic risks—the notion that AI systems may one day be so powerful that they could exterminate humanity or be used by malicious humans to cause widespread harm.
How California Turned on its Own Citizens
from doordash-style paraphernalia delivery to legal teams suing the city each time it clears encampments: the grim story of how sf captures drug addicts so they can get high until they die
Escaping the AI Guilt Trap in Texas
I started at Stanford Law School in 1997. I don't say this to note how old I am, but rather to point out that my tenure there was just two years after the notorious Stanford Law School speech code was defeated, in a court case called Corry v. Stanford University(FIRE Executive Vice President interviewed the case’s namesake, Rob Corry, for the podcast back in 2017, which I encourage you to check out!).
America is Sleepwalking Into a Permanent DEI Bureaucracy That Regulates AI
Even though Trump has vowed to rescind Biden’s AI executive order, an onslaught of state bills around AI is coming These bills will use the AI Risk Management Framework (RMF), an outdated and little-known Office of Management and Budget regulatory memo written before the release of ChatGPT This memo is overly focused on DEI, calling for never-ending DEI-style impact assessments to “mitigate” the “harms” of “systemic bias,” which is “omnipresent” in the “design, implementation, operation, and...
Regulatory Policy Experts: Both Harris and Trump Threaten Constraints on Innovation | Opinion
Editor's Note: Although partisans on both sides of the aisle have warned that the stakes of the upcoming presidential election could not be higher, the two campaigns themselves have been remarkably light on policy substance. With Election Day now less than a month away, we reached out to dozens of thinkers, writers, and analysts we trust with a simple question: What are your biggest policy concerns about a potential Trump or Harris administration?
The Forces Behind Scott Wiener's Steadfast Defense of SB 1047
Groundswell of Opposition to CA’s AI Bill as it Nears Vote criticisms of sb 1047 have reached a fever pitch, with academics and politicians joining silicon valley in a rejection of the ambiguous regulatory regime it would impose on the industry
Only Congress and DARPA can rein in the dangers of AI
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Only Congress and DARPA can rein in the dangers of AI
Dean Ball 12 minutes ago AI is stretching the boundaries of existing internet protocols. A working group between DARPA, NIST and other federal agencies could help.
Software Update Glitch Disrupts Air Travel and Other Industries Original
Bad code from CrowdStrike knocked out 8.5 million devices running Microsoft Windows. Published July 22, 2024 “Never push an update on a Friday,” a computer scientist told a BBC reporter after information technology outages caused global blackouts, disrupting air travel as well as hospital and emergency service systems, , finance and banking services, and restaurants. More than 1,500 flights a day have been canceled over the last three days.
Blockchain has a role to play in countering the ill effects of AI
Dean Ball 18 minutes ago Cryptocurrencies struggle to interact with regulatory and financial systems that were not designed for them, but they complement AI. 52 Total views Listen to article 0:00 Opinion Own this piece of crypto history Collect this article as NFT Join us on social networks The rise of generative AI has raised questions for policymakers about how to govern these powerful new technologies.
Can Pro-family Policy Unite the Right?
June 23, 2024 Politics requires building coalitions in order to win elections. For those on the right, this means there is no alternative but to pursue some kind of fusionism among its competing elements. A revitalized fusionism would not look quite like the right's prior successful coalitions, however: It would need to account for 21st-century realities, which means it will need to put family policy at the forefront of its agenda.
Move Fast and Make Things
Revitalizing American manufacturing has become at once a bipartisan priority and a source of contentious debate in Washington. Some believe that tariffs, direct subsidies to industry, and similar industrial policies are the solution. Others argue these policies will cause more problems than they will solve. Some debate whether American manufacturing has declined as much as is commonly believed.
AI and accountability: Policymakers risk halting AI innovation
Moving through the California Legislature is Senate Bill 1047, introduced by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, an ambitious proposal to supervise advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models. AI will eventually transform the economy, communications, and government itself, bringing uncertainty and, for many people, an understandable hesitance.
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