Dean W. Ball on America's AI Action Plan & 4 Months at the White House

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I am thrilled to have Dean W. Ball back for his fifth appearance on the podcast. Fresh off a brief but historic tenure as Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology at the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy. Dean is living proof that a talented person with a passion for understanding AI can go from a newcomer to the field to the highest levels of influence in as little as a year. After spending the first ten years of his career at Policy Think Tanks, Dean took a leap of faith and quit his job to start thinking and writing about AI full-time, launching his Substack Hyperdimensional in January 2024 Around that time, he sent me a Twitter DM about apparent contradictions between OpenAI's preparedness framework and its super-alignment plan. So he wonders if an OpenAI plan to rely on automated alignment researchers for safety, while at the same time flagging model autonomy as a leading source of catastrophic risk.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:02)
It was a good question, and I became an early subscriber.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:06)
The first of Dean's posts that really stuck with me was one he called Software's Romantic Era. About his first interactions with Claude III Opus, in which Claude expressed the desire to understand what embodiment feels like and to hear music. Claude's first request would be Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, a fascinating choice since Beethoven was deaf when he wrote it and never actually heard it himself. I still remember one of the concluding lines, quote, Here, finally, is an AI system whose thoughts I want to hear. What a brilliant way to capture the spine-tingling difference between Claude III and earlier models, and more broadly between AI and all other technology. Dean's profile began to rise in a serious way thanks to his early criticism of California's SB 1047, which inspired open-source and progress advocates to take an interest and ultimately led to multiple rounds of revisions.

**Nathan Labenz** (2:01)
While we never ended up fully agreeing on the build, I was impressed that unlike so many of the shrill voices in that debate, Dean moderated his criticism as the build itself evolved.

**Erik Torenberg** (2:12)
From there, he started showing up everywhere, at the curve, as an FAI Fellow, as an affiliate of Fandom, and with a podcast of his own.

**Nathan Labenz** (2:20)
And then, he got the call to join the White House.

**Erik Torenberg** (2:24)
Now, regular listeners will know that I did not vote for President Trump. That is nevertheless very excited for him and, more importantly, for the country. There are not many people on the political right or, frankly, anywhere, who combine the impulse to get hands on and use the technology to the fullest, with a healthy respect for how powerful it could soon become, plus a deep appreciation for the nuances and challenges of integrating it into society and governance effectively. I thought then, and I continue to believe now, that Dean was perhaps the single best person the Trump administration could plausibly have picked for the role. At the White House, Dean led the effort to develop America's AI Action Plan, which very well might be the most well-received policy the Trump administration has put out to date on any topic, with positive reviews from many people who expected to hate it, including an endorsement from President Biden's former National Security Advisor, Jake Semmelvin, on the most recent episode of this very top test. Yes, it is a broadly accelerationist document framed in terms of beating China, but it's also extremely sophisticated, calling for what I believe will prove to be very prudent investments in evaluations and risk assessment, eye of security, AI-enabled science, mechanistic interpretability, compute governance, and much more. In this conversation, we discuss why Dean is now leaving the White House, including his candid self-assessment that while he's great at conceptual work, implementation can probably be better done by somebody else. We explore how the American political right is grappling with AI, from deregulatory impulses to culture war concerns, and worries about AI's impact on children. We also dig into the mechanics of unlocking spare gigawatts for data centers. Your Dean's perspective on which frontier developers should be considered live players and how they're perceived in Washington, it get his perspective on what the AI safety and governance communities can best do to complement the government's work going forward. Along the way, we also hear how Dean used LLMs to simulate interagency feedback meetings, how the four-year presidential term, which ends in January 2029, just happens to put the administration in sync with many AGI forecasts, and why Dean believes that the Republican Party might become the better home of the AI safety world in the long run. Between his rapid rise and his brief White House tenure, you might say that Dean embodies short timelines. And while I am sad to see him leave such a high-impact role, I hope that his story inspires others who may have similar potential to take their own leap of faith and get into the AI game. We need all the Deans we can get, and we need them as soon as possible. Finally, I want to say congratulations to Dean and his wife on their upcoming first child, another reason he's leaving the White House, and to thank Dean for doing this. He could easily have booked a much bigger platform for his first post-White House interview, and I'm sure those will still come. But I'm grateful he chose to have this conversation here. It was super fun for me, and I always appreciate the chance to dig into so many important details. With that, I hope you enjoy this super deep dive into four months in the Trump White House and the crafting of America's AI Action Plan with Dean W. Ball.