What Should Be Done - by Dean W. Ball - Hyperdimensional

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What Should Be Done<br>35 thoughts on what has happened and what America should do

Dean W. Ball<br>Jun 26, 2026

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Nothing below is an official or unofficial view of OpenAI.<br>On the Current State of Affairs

When President Trump signed it earlier this month, I argued that the Executive Order on Cyber and AI, which claimed to establish a voluntary testing program for frontier AI models, was really establishing a de facto involuntary licensing/preapproval regime for frontier models. This analysis has proven correct. First the administration revoked public access to Fable, Anthropic’s latest frontier model, because of security fears. Now, it appears that OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 is being limited to only a small set of US companies at the request of the US government.

One major problem with this, as implemented, is that nobody knows what the requirements are to get licensed.

When I say “nobody” I mean it literally: the administration itself does not seem to know what safety standards or best practices a company would have to observe for them to be comfortable with the broad release of a model that matches or exceeds Mythos in capability.

This means that, every time a lab asks if they can release their model to the general public, the answer from the government will be “no.” This will be true until there is some sort of safety standard or specification that gives the government a sense that the models are safe.

The government, according to some reporting, is trying to make such a standard, but it is unclear what the timeline for its completion is. More importantly, it is also unclear (a) whether it will be public, given the aforementioned Executive Order’s reliance on a classified “voluntary” testing program and (b) whether it will be good, given how new many of the senior administration officials now involved in AI policy are new to the issue, combined with the complexity of the topic at hand. Nobody I know in the Trump administration has any frontier AI experience. Just a few months ago, someone with experience at both OpenAI and Anthropic was hired to run the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), but he was fired by senior administration officials within a few days. The rest of the staff at the CAISI have reportedly been on a stop-work order, not even allowed to communicate with other government agencies, for much of the “post-Mythos” crisis period. The lack of technically expert staff is one of many reasons to doubt the near-term ability of this administration to produce a high-quality safety standard anytime soon.

Despite these criticisms, the Trump administration is not at all directionally wrong that something must be done about the catastrophic risk potential of frontier AI systems. Nothing about the fundamental security and safety concerns is illegitimate. They are serious concerns that many, including myself, have pointed out in public repeatedly. In my case, I also pointed them out while I was a staffer in the White House, and wrote about them as part of my contributions to this administration’s official AI strategy, the AI Action Plan.

Despite these warnings about AI risks, there are administration officials, prominent external allies, and others who spent the last year singing a lullaby about the risks of frontier AI. They downplayed these concerns, or just as often ignored them altogether. In some cases they explicitly mocked them, as when a draft executive order leaked—a mere 7 months ago—that referred to the catastrophic risk potential of AI as a “purely speculative suspicion.” The view of this group was that state transparency laws intended to modestly protect against AI catastrophic risk were a bigger threat than AI catastrophic risk itself. This posture was a mistake, as I have been arguing for nearly two years now. I wish I had been able to counter this deeply mistaken advice more forcefully when I was inside the administration, but I was not. Mea culpa.

Nonetheless, it is wrong to blame the administration as a whole for this. The vast majority of the people now making decisions were not involved in AI policy a year ago, and many of those people were inclined to ignore the issue because of the poor advice described in point (7).

It is also wrong to blame those who saw these risks coming for somehow causing this regulatory response, as industry figures like Marc Andreessen are doing. A common topic of conversation in the AI policy community for the past three years has been about the importance of raising government awareness now (well, then), such that government did not overreact when the big risks started to manifest themselves. Well, here we are. Maybe all of us could have played the last 1-3 years better (without a doubt), but the truth is that the Trump administration’s actions here are being driven by the fundamental reality of AI progress, and not by the rhetoric of...