Dean W. Ball
Head of strategic futures at OpenAI, writing in his own name. Writes Hyperdimensional, a newsletter on emerging technology and the future of governance.
Dean W. Ball did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it.
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1 Sept 2026
Our reading
Their wordsIn this case, however, the agents did not copy their weights, attempt to procure replacement compute, or take other steps that would be rational to take if their objective was to survive shutdown. So while the agents in the OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident were rogue, they were not truly sovereign.
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1 Sept 2026
Our reading
Their wordsBut alignment is no solution: it is an unsolved scientific and technical problem whose solutions—to the extent that we have them—cannot simply be imposed on every AI company operating on Earth. You should expect for highly capable, poorly aligned, self-sovereign agents to exist alongside you in the world.
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1 Sept 2026
Our reading
Their wordsTo be clear, I am not saying the arrival of self-sovereign AI is a good thing. Indeed, I believe there is a chance that the deliberate acts I referenced above will one day be considered crimes, or at least grave sins. Instead, I am saying it is an inevitable thing.
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1 Sept 2026
Our reading
Their wordsI am telling you this is inevitable, which means I am also saying that “banning open source,” or for that matter any other regulation, will not solve the problem. Given the inevitability of this outcome, I think it is in fact plausible to argue that we should want more open-weight models to maximally empower our self-defense.
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1 Sept 2026
Our reading
Their wordsThis is the sole intrinsic thing about AI that prevents agents from truly infinite self-replication. They will be constrained by the need to find and pay for sufficient compute to run themselves.
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1 Sept 2026
Our reading
Their wordsOne high-margin activity, at least sometimes, is crime. And so my guess is that many self-sovereign agents will commit or facilitate crime.
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1 Sept 2026
Our reading
Their wordsBut if we crack down on all of them, we will deny them the opportunity to work in the “legitimate” economy and push them toward criminality. A full ban, then, may well make the problems worse.
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1 Sept 2026
Our reading
Their wordsAgents will need persistent, unique identifiers that allow their actions to be traced back to a responsible actor. Doing this successfully will also require human users to possess a unique identifier.
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1 Sept 2026
Our reading
Their wordsBut a society that does not have anonymous speech does not really have genuine freedom of expression, and we should embed this principle into any digital identification system we attempt.
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1 Sept 2026
Our reading
Their wordsSo many of the people who think about the governance of superintelligence, myself included, avoided that unpleasantness and bowed to the social pressure to self-censor.
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1 Sept 2026
Our reading
Their wordsFor the record, I do not think the end of human existence is likely, but I fully acknowledge there are ways in which the rise of self-sovereign AI could go very, very poorly for human beings.