RESOLVING THE LEDGER
This is one outlet's own report from Business Insider — the article as it was filed. Other outlets are covering the same event; open the full story to compare every source side by side.
See the full story · 1 sourcesDean Ball in San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore. Christie Hemm Klok for BI
On a gloomy July evening, Dean Ball is appraising the political theory shelf in the basement of San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore. It's the end of his second day at OpenAI , and he's arrived straight from orientation in a cashmere zip-up hoodie, carrying a company-issued tote bag. He pulls a copy of Friedrich Hayek's "The Pure Theory of Capital" from the shelf, notes how rare it is to see it in the wild, and flips through its pages. It's a fitting choice.
Ball has landed in a distinctly Hayekian role at OpenAI. The 20th century economist, as Ball recounts to me, argued that political change begins not at the ballot box but among intellectuals, whose ideas would eventually filter into government. His work inspired a generation of right-wing think tanks that helped remake American politics. One of them, the Manhattan Institute, gave Ball his first job after college.
In June, OpenAI announced that it had hired the 34-year-old Ball to lead its new "strategic futures" team, a think tank of sorts, charged with shaping AI policy from within the company. It's a broad mandate for a nervy time. Nearly everyone agrees artificial intelligence is becoming more powerful; many believe it could become catastrophically dangerous. In late July a rogue OpenAI agent hacked into the AI startup Hugging Face's systems on its own, sending a fresh wave of fears about the technology's capacities. There is little agreement over how, when, or by whom AI should be regulated.
@media (min-width: 768px) {
.vertical-image-wrapper {
display: flex;
justify-content: center;
}
.vertical-image-wrapper .vertical-image {
width: min(calc(80vh * var(--img-w) / var(--img-h)), 100%);
min-width: 0;
}
}
Ball worked for years in state and city policy at think tanks, and started publishing a Substack about AI, “Hyperdimensional,” in 2024.;
Christie Hemm Klok for BI
If Ball — who's made a name for himself as a voluble Substack writer and as a key author of the Trump administration's AI Action Plan — gets his way, the AI labs will become what he calls a "counterbalance to government." They will continue to churn out increasingly powerful technology, unconstrained by laws that would ban development or preempt upheaval in the labor market. "Dean has spent a lot of time thinking seriously about some of the biggest questions frontier AI labs need to get right," Ball's new boss, OpenAI strategy head Jason Kwon , said in a statement. "He'll help us pressure-test our assumptions," Kwon added, and think through questions around AI safety, economic impacts, and the "evolving relationship between governments, companies, and society." Ball tells me he wants to articulate genuinely new visions for what superintelligent AI can deliver. He'll leave direct lobbying to others. "I'm way too spiky of a guy for that," he says.
Spiky is right — Ball's rise from local policy wonk into AI's elite has earned him a fair share of enemies. Some critics say he's a naive AI booster, others that his AI-era William F. Buckley persona is a put-on. Emil Michael , who leads the Pentagon's research and engineering office, called Ball the "supreme village idiot" of AI in a July post to X, adding, "Dean Ball has perhaps the biggest gap between actual IQ and his own perceived IQ of anyone in the industry (about 40 points)." Michael isn't his only former colleague to disavow him. The White House declined to provide an on-the-record statement for this story, and connected me with a current official who asked to remain anonymous. The official tells me that Ball is no longer trusted by the administration and claims that he's dramatically inflated his impact on the action plan.
Ball says he still has friends in the administration and people across agencies that he advises every day. There are people he's pissed off, too, but the idea that he inflated his input on the action plan is "completely false," he says. "If you mean it, say it on the fucking record."
I spoke with Ball a few times during his first weeks at OpenAI. A self-described "information hedonist," he's equally delighted to dissect avant-garde film as influential policy research. Over a dinner in San Francisco, he pontificated about the Enlightenment, cited many of his own predictions, spoke in machine-learning analogies and Latin phrases, and said that parts of Biden-era AI policy were "woke shit." He's become an influential figure within AI's executive class, making him a useful weather vane for the technology's changing political winds.
Ball realized in college: "Fighting in the battle of ideas is totally what I want to be doing." Christie Hemm Klok for BI
Ball was raised middle-class in Northern Virginia, by parents with what he called "lib-coded" jobs. His dad, a punk rock drummer turned therapist, would take him on ride-alongs to clients struggling with substance abuse. "I saw a lot of shit when I was young. He exposed me to that stuff," he says. Finishing high school in 2010, Ball still felt "apathetic" about politics.
He arrived at Hamilton College , the upstate New York liberal arts school, to find that the professor he'd adored in a pre-enrollment lecture had been denied tenure and had left for the Alexander Hamilton Institute, a conservative think tank nearby. Ball visited, joined a Hayek reading group, and was bowled over. The idea that he wasn't being handed the economist's work in his regular college classes felt ludicrous .
"I kind of just realized, wait, fighting in the battle of ideas is totally what I want to be doing," Ball says. "Because this is ridiculous. This guy is so much smarter than any of my professors and the fact that my professors would deign to tell me I shouldn't read him for whatever stupid, narrow-minded reason they have, I cannot abide by that." He started inhaling right-of-center political theory.
After graduating, he joined the Manhattan Institute, focusing ...
AIPROPX is an independent multi-source news index — we track, compare, and connect coverage from across the web into one place you won't find anywhere else.