On AI policy : Lately, lots of powerful people have been balking about the idea of AI safety. At the woefully misnomered AI Action Summit in Paris, Vice President JD Vance dismissed the idea of AI safety and suggested that as long as America beat everyone else in creating superintelligence, the rest would all take care of itself.

In Arena , the prominent AI policy thinker and writer Dean Ball thinks through all of the unanswered questions posed by a vision like Vance’s — and in doing so, offers a compelling answer to the question of what AI policy is even for, anyway. Responding to some of the ideas in Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s essay “Machines of Loving Grace” last year, Ball attempts to navigate from the invention of superintelligence to the establishment of dominance over the inventing country’s rivals.

He writes:

How quickly does superintelligence enable, as Amodei puts it, “robust military superiority”? Superintelligence-driven militaries will presumably not just outthink their foes — they will need to be able to destroy or otherwise render inoperable things in the physical world in some radically better way than we can imagine today. We will need to build new weapons. Will doing so require technology alone, or will we also need to transform the Pentagon’s procurement and other bureaucratic procedures? How do we expect China, and every other country on Earth, to react to America’s explicit plan to accelerate AI to secure enduring American hegemony? In some ways, the most potent adversary of American technology is in fact Europe, with its endless, and often overtly anti-American regulations.

How confident are we that each of these questions will work out in our favor? Are we confident enough to make this vague strategy the operating plan for the rest of the decade? Are we confident enough to risk untold trillions? Are we confident enough to risk starting a war? Should we be thinking about this more carefully?

These questions carry more urgency in a time when President Trump and Elon Musk are eliminating whole swathes of the US government, including the portions of it that were previously devoted to creating AI policy. They also carry more urgency in the wake of DeepSeek’s release of R1.

Ball concludes:

Turning AI into an enduring source of national strength will require far more than just having the best models, since experience has shown us that these can often be quickly and easily replicated by our friends and enemies alike. Instead, it will require building new capabilities with AI, creating wholly new inventions, and engaging in the institutional innovation that allows those new creations to be built and flourish.

A country with excess intelligence but dysfunctional institutions may not be a superpower for long.

Guiding powerful AI toward productive ends will require, at a minimum, robust institutions to harness its potential. It will also require robust institutions to mitigate the risks that come with great intelligence. Which makes it all the more disappointing that, just as the need for them becomes more clear, those institutions are being dismantled.

Early thoughts on GPT-4.5