What Should Be Done ↗

Dean W. Ball, a former White House AI policy staffer now joining OpenAI, writing at Hyperdimensional on the de facto licensing regime the US has built for frontier AI.

Ball argues for regulating the labs as institutions, not the individual models they release. Independent verifiers would audit each lab against its own safety framework:

An attentive reader will note that my proposal de-emphasizes regulating publicly released models and focuses instead on regulating the frontier lab as an entity.

He calls concentrated access the deeper danger:

You should not expect the most powerful people in the world using the most powerful technology ever conceived in a way that is inscrutable to the public to turn out well, and you should see that dynamic as fundamentally inconsistent with a democratic republic.

And he warns the limits could be self-defeating, creating the AI overbuild that skeptics predict:

No one is building $100 billion dollar data centers to serve frontier models to whatever 100 companies the US government will allow access.