Dean Ball said advanced AI could radically concentrate power in the hands of those who control it, and he warned that governments could stop needing to listen to citizens if robots wage wars and omniscient software runs the bureaucracy. That’s the shape of the future being sold from the top: more automation, more control, less say for everyone else.
Who Gets to Rule
Ball, who studies AI policy, joined the White House last year as an AI adviser and helped write the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan before departing and later joining OpenAI in July. In an interview published Sept. 4, 2026, in The Atlantic, he said, "My view is that we basically have transformative AI in the world now. You’re living in a world that is being transformed. It is happening." The people writing the rules keep moving between government and corporate power. The doors spin. The hierarchy stays.
OpenAI’s Strategic Futures team has styled itself as inheriting the task of America’s Founding Fathers, and Ball wrote in a new OpenAI blog post, "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." That’s the language of legitimacy, polished for public consumption. The company frames itself as a guardian of liberty while building systems that Ball says could concentrate power and displace labor in ways that disempower humans.
Ball said he is interested in studying what new political institutions might be needed to avoid that fate. He also said, "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." That fear isn’t abstract. It’s the recognition that decisions are being made elsewhere, by people with access to the machines, the capital, and the state apparatus.
Balancing Power, Preserving Power
Ball said, "You’re not trying to avoid all concentration of power, but to balance it." He said that if this era gives rise to corporations with tremendous power, that is good so long as those organizations are governed and the government that oversees them grows in lockstep. He said, "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."
That’s the reform trap in plain sight. The answer offered isn’t dismantling domination. It’s managing it better, spreading it around, and calling the arrangement balance. Ball’s preferred world still leaves the government overseeing the companies, the companies building the systems, and everyone else adapting to whatever gets imposed.
He said, "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." The language of mission and utility doesn’t hide the basic fact: private firms are racing to control systems that Ball himself says can reshape labor, bureaucracy, and war.
What the State Can Still Do
Ball said, "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." The state has already produced hundreds of laws, and the result, by Ball’s own account, still doesn’t satisfy people. So the answer becomes another layer of institutions, another body to manage the pace of technological domination.
He imagined a federal body that could dictate the ratio an AI lab is allowed to spend on internal deployment of models to do automated AI research. He said, "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." That line says plenty. People are reduced to pulling a lever while the real decisions stay in the hands of labs, advisers, and the state officials who shuttle between them.
The Atlantic interview was by Matteo Wong, a staff writer at The Atlantic, and it was published Sept. 4, 2026, at 1:01 p.m. ET. The whole exchange reads like a blueprint for managed domination: corporate power, state oversight, and a public told to trust the people building the machine.