Astral Codex Ten

Dean Ball

11 min read

Dean Ball

Article

Dean Ball is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 9 times across 9 issues between September 17, 2024 and February 25, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Dean Ball has a sort of vague vision of LLMs betting on prediction markets at massive scale”; “Dean Ball calls this strategy “an unholy alliance with the unions and the misinformation crusaders and all the rest””; “other people’s notes on the same conference: Dean Ball”. It most often appears alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, California.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 9
  • Issue count: 9
  • First seen: September 17, 2024
  • Last seen: February 25, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

24
September 17, 2024 · Original source
2: Dean Ball has a sort of vague vision of LLMs betting on prediction markets at massive scale. I agree something like this is interesting and plausible; I agree that it’s hard to pin down exactly how it would work. One suggestion he makes is to have the bots shadow public intellectuals - for example, a bot “trained on” my writing would ask itself “how would Scott Alexander bet in this market?”, and if it made more money than a bot asking “how would Tyler Cowen bet in this market?”, then maybe you would trust me more than Tyler. This is cute but there are a lot of wrinkles to work out For example, I talk more about superforecasting and probability calibration than Tyler, my bot might simulate me by making good bets; if Tyler sometimes uses extreme or ideological language, his bot might make worse bets not because his ideas are worse, but because it “simulates” him as being an incautious better.
Inline links: a sort of vague vision of LLMs betting on prediction markets at massive scale
SB 1047: Our Side Of The Story
October 10, 2024 · Original source
Dean Ball wrote:
Inline links: wrote
Dean Ball calls this strategy “an unholy alliance with the unions and the misinformation crusaders and all the rest”, and equates it to selling our souls. I admit we have many cultural and ethical differences with socialists, that I don’t want to become them, that I can’t fully endorse them, and that I’m sure they feel the same way about me. But coalition politics doesn’t require perfect agreement. The US and its European allies were willing to form an “unholy alliance” with some unsavory socialists in order to defeat the Nazis, they did defeat the Nazis, and they kept their own commitments to capitalism and democracy intact.
Last year, I would have told Dean not to worry about us allying with the Left - the Left would never accept an alliance with the likes of us anyway. But I was surprised by how fairly socialist media covered the SB 1047 fight. For example, from Jacobin3:
Inline links: Jacobin, 3
Notes From The Progress Studies Conference
October 24, 2024 · Original source
(other people’s notes on the same conference: Ben Parry, Dean Ball)
Inline links: Ben Parry, Dean Ball
Links For February 2025
February 27, 2025 · Original source
44: My list of links to publish today includes something like a dozen about DeepSeek, which now seems so thoroughly yesterday’s news that I’m tempted to throw them all out. But in case you still have questions about it, I felt most enlightened by takes from Dean Ball (X), Helen Toner (X), and Miles Brundage (X). The story seems to be that DeepSeek genuinely did a great job, made extensive algorithmic progress, and was able to create an excellent AI on chips scrounged up from before the export controls hit + mediocre chips that got through the export controls. Along with these real reasons to be impressed, there is also a little bit of illusion at work - OpenAI delayed announcing o1 for a long time (remember the rumors about “Q*” and “Strawberry”?) and DeepSeek was very fast to announce r1, which made DeepSeek seem closer behind OpenAI than they really were. Most of the smart people I read said that the absolute worst response to this (from an arms race point of view) would be to give up on export controls - if a rival has geniuses who can use resources ultra-effectively, you don’t want to also give them more resources!
Inline links: Dean Ball (X), Helen Toner (X), Miles Brundage (X)
Links For April 2025
April 22, 2025 · Original source
You may remember Miles Brundage from OpenAI Safety Team Quitting Incident #25018 (or maybe 25019, I can’t remember). He’s got an AI policy Substack too, here’s a dialogue with Dean Ball.
Inline links: an AI policy Substack too, here’s
If you’re at all familiar with AI policy you already know Dean Ball (Substack here), but congratulate him on being named White House senior policy advisor.
Inline links: here, being named White House senior policy advisor
35: One bright spot in the political climate: FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), originally founded to protect students from cancel culture, has done a great job pivoting to protect students from getting deported over pro-Palestine views. I am impressed with their principled stance and have donated. In related news, FIRE has partnered with Substack to defend writers, and FIRE president Greg Lukianoff has co-written an article with Dean Ball on free speech and AI regulation.
Inline links: FIRE, FIRE has partnered with Substack to defend writers, free speech and AI regulation
Open Thread 391
July 21, 2025 · Original source
1: Asterisk Magazine is launching an AI blogging fellowship for people who know things about AI and want to get into blogging. August 24 - October 6, remote, compatible with holding a different full-time job on the side. You will do Zoom calls with peers, mentors, and people who will motivate you to write things; at the end you will have some articles that will get published on Asterisk's website and some assistance in getting a longer-term platform. I’m one of the mentors; others include Dean Ball (White House AI senior policy advisor), Timothy Lee (Understanding AI) and Sam Bowman (Anthropic). Read more here, apply here.
Inline links: here, here
Links For October 2025
October 30, 2025 · Original source
40: Dean Ball proposes an AI pre-emption deal. Congressional Republicans worry that if all fifty states pass different AI bills, then there will be so many regulations that it’s near-impossible for AI companies to follow them all. They and Dean (a former White House policy advisor) have proposed federal preemption, where Congress bans states from regulating the industry and instead regulates it directly from DC. Ted Cruz tried to pass an AI preemption bill in June. But many people suspected that Congress would ban states from regulating AI, not regulate AI itself, and leave the field totally unregulated - so a combination of pro-regulation Democrats and anti-big-tech Republicans defeated the bill. If the pre-emptionists try again, their strategy will be to peel off some groups with pet issues from the anti-preemption coalition, promising them concessions (either that Congress will take their pet issue seriously, or that they’ll carve out an exception to the preemption where states can still regulate on their pet issue) to cajole them into switching sides. AI safety is a plausible beneficiary of such bargaining, given that the Republicans’ real enmity is towards other groups with more “woke” concerns. I think this is the context for Dean’s proposal - a potential draft of a preemption bill that tries to peel off AI safety people as a favored bargaining partner. And Anton Leicht argues that safetyists should take Dean’s preemption deal. Miles Brundage says (X) he “would like to see something non-trivially stronger, esp. around third-party auditing...but think his basic line of thinking is good.”
Inline links: Dean Ball proposes an AI pre-emption deal., Anton Leicht argues that safetyists should take Dean’s preemption deal., says (X)
Why AI Safety Won't Make America Lose The Race With China
November 26, 2025 · Original source
Leverage their applications advantage as hard as possible. They imagine that sure, maybe America will have AI that’s 1-2 years more advanced than theirs. But if our smarter AI is still just sitting in a data center answering user queries - and their dumber AI is already integrated with tens of thousands of humanoid robots, automated drones, missile targeting systems, etc - then they still win. This is a very practical strategy from a very practical country. The Chinese don’t really believe in recursive self-improvement or superintelligence4. If they did, they wouldn’t be so blasé about the possibility of America having AIs 1-2 years more advanced than theirs - if our models pass the superintelligence threshold while theirs are still approaching it, then their advantage in humanoids and drones no longer seems so impressive. What is the optimal counter-strategy for America? We’re still debating specifics, but a skeletal, obvious-things-only version might be to preserve our compute advantage as long as possible, protect our technological secrets from Chinese espionage, and put up as much of a fight as possible on the application layer. The State Of AI Safety Policy It’s worth being specific about what we mean by “AI safety regulation”. The two most discussed AI safety bills of the past year - California’s SB53 and New York’s RAISE Act - as well as Dean Ball’s proposed federal AI safety preemption bill - all focus on a few key topics: The biggest companies (eg OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) must disclose their model spec, ie the internal document saying what their models are vs. aren’t banned from doing.
Inline links: Leverage their applications advantage as hard as possible., don’t really believe in, 4, SB53, RAISE Act, Dean Ball’s proposed federal AI safety preemption bill
This section comes mostly from personal conversations, but is pretty similar to the conclusions of Nathan Barnard and Dean Ball.
Inline links: Nathan Barnard, Dean Ball
The Pentagon Threatens Anthropic
February 25, 2026 · Original source
Dean Ball, previous Trump White House OSTP Senior Policy Advisor on AI (source). Superforecaster Nuño Sempere, maybe as part of his work with Sentinel. He seems to think higher chance of supply chain risk than others, but that supply chain risk might be handled in a way that only affects DoD contracts themselves, which wouldn’t be so bad. I haven’t heard anyone else make this distinction. Tweet here, full document here. And big praise to most other AI companies, including Anthropic’s competitors, for standing up for them and for the AI industry more broadly:
Inline links: source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DrEn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Feaff377e-1f44-450c-82af-fc62d33e0832_1225x1128.jpeg, here,, here
Boaz is member of technical staff at OpenAI. Jeff is Chief Scientist at Google (see also Jeff Dean Facts) And most of all, big praise to the American people, with special love to the large plurality of Trump voters standing against this:
Inline links: Jeff Dean Facts