Late last month, OpenAI launched a rather grand mission: nothing less than defending individual political freedom in an age of all-powerful machines. The company’s “Strategic Futures” team has styled itself, in a sense, as inheriting the task of America’s Founding Fathers: “We labor in service of the ideals of free expression and individual liberty that are enshrined in the humble parchment of the U.S. Constitution,” Dean Ball, the team’s leader, wrote in a new OpenAI blog post. (The post opens with a quote from James Madison in The Federalist Papers.)Ball worries that advanced AI could radically concentrate power in the hands of those who control it, displacing labor in ways that disempower humans. In an extreme scenario, governments will have no need to listen to their citizens if there are robots to wage wars and omniscient software to run the bureaucracy. Ball is interested in studying what new political institutions might be needed to avoid this fate.Many Americans—a majority of whom express distrust toward the AI industry, outrage about data centers, and fears about their job security—already seem to be feeling this loss of agency very deeply. And the AI boom has already generated enormous amounts of wealth in just a handful of tech companies—including OpenAI itself. To say the least, it’s paradoxical for one of the most influential companies in the world’s most powerful industry to decry the AI-enabled concentration of power. So I reached out to Ball to understand more about his unease about the industry he works in, and how he wants to see the United States adapt to AI.Ball, who studies AI policy, is something of a minor celebrity in the industry. Last year, he joined the White House as an AI adviser and helped write the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, a policy road map for the technology. He eventually departed, seemingly on good terms, from the administration before publicly lambasting it during its dispute with Anthropic earlier this year. Then, in July, he joined OpenAI. “My view is that we basically have transformative AI in the world now,” Ball told me. “You’re living in a world that is being transformed. It is happening.”This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Matteo Wong: You write that concentration of power through AI could upend the basic human freedoms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Can you elaborate on how?Dean Ball: Fundamentally, political power is the geographically bounded ability to wield the monopoly on legitimate force and violence. Doing so has heretofore required the cooperation of a great many human beings. You needed militaries, you needed people in those militaries, and you needed people to keep those militaries fed and supplied. And you needed people to pay for all of that through taxation. So people had a seat at the table because, in some sense, everything is being provided by them.Now you have to assume that robotics is going to advance soon in the same way that general digital intelligence has. Maybe it will take longer than I think. But at that point, the ability to project violence no longer requires people. And it is also conceivable that AI might generate sufficient revenue that the government would not need to rely on taxing people.If you look at the politics of AI, I think Americans are smart and have a sense that their seat at the table might be getting smaller. They’re right to be scared.Wong: You’re talking about concentration of power in the government, but generative AI is a technology developed in the private sector. There is potential for a rare and even unprecedented concentration of power in industry. What risks does that pose?Ball: You’re not trying to avoid all concentration of power, but to balance it. If this era gives rise to corporations that have a tremendous amount of power in the world, I think that’s good—so long as those organizations are governed. In other words, so long as the government that oversees them grows in lockstep.People tend to assume that AI residing in private hands is inherently a concentration-of-power risk. But I think that an extremely well-run, government-owned superintelligence lab is a bigger concentration-of-power risk than a polycentric world where there are many superintelligences made by different, competing companies overseen by a government. Monopolies are the concern.Wong: As far as private concentration of power goes, there are arguably now two frontier labs, your employer and Anthropic. The market doesn’t seem to be providing many checks on them.Ball: I think it’s a fiercely competitive market right now. And China, of course, is delivering highly capable open-source models. It’s possible this is going to commodify the products that OpenAI and Anthropic offer. I don’t agree with that, but you can’t dismiss it as a crazy outcome. OpenAI’s mission is to deliver artificial general intelligence safely to the world. If that means we’re more like a utility than we are like a big, fancy tech company, so be it.Wong: This brings us to the core of your essay. If today’s political institutions and market dynamics are not up to the task of protecting human freedom during an AI era, what must change?Ball: There are AI regulations that I think are sensible to pass. States have passed hundreds of laws about artificial intelligence, and those things are not satisfying the demands of people. What we will need is new political institutions that give us a way of talking about the rate of acceleration in our society.I’m imagining a federal body could dictate the ratio that an AI lab is allowed to spend on internal deployment of models to do automated AI research. You could say that, this month, you’re going to be allowed to use 45 percent of your compute for that, and next month, it’ll be 47 percent or 52 percent or some other number. That might slow the rate of AI development, but then a company could use that extra compute to lower costs for consumers. Then this dial for AI development would also become a mechanism with the dual effect of slowing or increasing the rate of technological diffusion.The closest structural analogy that we have is probably interest rates, which is a kind of hyper-parameter on the economy that policy makers can tune. The Federal Reserve is an institution in and of itself, and on top of that, there is an enormous apparatus that exists, including a bond market, interest-rate traders, analysts, media commentary, political oversight in the form of Congress. All of that taken together, in my view, would constitute the institutional complex. That’s a type of political institution. I’m not saying we need to create a new branch of government or something.Wong: That makes sense regarding the pace of development and diffusion. I’m not totally following how such a measure ties back to your concerns about human freedoms.Ball: It’s one example of an institution that would give people a sense of meaningful political control over the technology. However, I do not think that the optimal outcome is one in which we take a vote on every single aspect of technological change. I’m not really a fan of data-center moratoria, but I understand that the American public is pulling a lever, and they think it is the one lever they have.Wong: What role can OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest of the industry play in trying to imagine these institutions and bring them into existence?Ball: I think the AI industry has actually been pretty good stewards, all things considered. No surprise that I’m saying this, because I’m from the AI industry, but there’s a reason that I am working in it. I would not say that every frontier AI company always has performed at 100 percent, by no means. But in the future, we may approach points where more costly things have to occur. The AI industry might have to do things that are not in its interest.Wong: Does your research agenda extend to economic freedoms, that is, how AI could affect the economy and distribution of wealth?Ball: The main thing we know how to do on that front is to invest in technological innovation and try to grow the economy by making new things possible.Wong: I think a lot of people would look at past products and technologies that have come out of Silicon Valley and think that what those enabled was a tremendous concentration of wealth and influence in a small number of companies—Ball: I’m not going to grant you that characterization of Silicon Valley. Has everything been perfect? Absolutely not. But my goodness, people have access to tremendous riches of information now; you can cause food to appear at your doorstep, which would have seemed like magic to the vast majority of humans who have ever lived.Wong: I could also point to the gig economy and the economics of Amazon and argue that those have not been good for a lot of people, including those who labor to make all that “magic” happen. It’s not magic.Ball: No one’s saying it’s magic. I’m saying it’s hard work. I was getting gas in rural Virginia recently, and when a woman came in wearing an Amazon vest, everyone congratulated her on the big new job. She was proud, and I don’t think we should belittle people for that.And by the way, people like you, Matteo—not to demonize you—will speak out of both sides of your mouth on this. On the one hand, you’ll talk about how the gig economy is dehumanizing and blah blah blah. But then the second anyone tries to introduce any autonomy into that and have, say, drone deliveries instead of people biking all around cities delivering meals, you’ll say, My God, you’re taking away the work from this gig economy.I’m less than thrilled by our current world, like everyone. But the existence of wealth is good. Innovators capture a shockingly small amount of the value that they create in society. If OpenAI is a fantastically successful company 10 years from now, a generational company, my bet is that we will capture a single-digit fraction of the value that AGI creates in this world. Wealth is not some resource that we divide up; it’s something we create. That’s the magic.Wong: But wealth is also something that’s divided up. One could alternatively look at generative AI and think of it as a particularly wealth-concentrating technology. To ask again, is wealth distribution something your team is thinking about?Ball: I don’t think we should invent a solution in search of a problem. So we shouldn’t invent some elaborate mechanism of wealth redistribution if today’s tax system works out. But we also have to prepare for a world in which that isn’t true.