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Their words
It may well be the case that neural networks will never be perfectly explainable, at least not in a way that satisfies human rationality.
Dean W. Ball
Writes Hyperdimensional, a newsletter on AI policy and governance. A White House AI policy adviser in 2025; joined OpenAI on 6 July 2026 to lead its Strategic Futures team.
Dean W. Ball did not write this page. ppll compiled it from their own words, each linked to the source. Is this you? · Report a mistake
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What they believe
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It may be the case that neural networks will never be perfectly explainable in a way that satisfies human rationality.
It may well be the case that neural networks will never be perfectly explainable, at least not in a way that satisfies human rationality.
hyperdimensional.coSaid 16 Oct 2026This on korrents
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Truly self-sovereign AI agents, running on compute no human owner can switch off, are inevitable rather than merely possible.
To be clear, I am not saying the arrival of self-sovereign AI is a good thing. Indeed, I believe there is a chance that the deliberate acts I referenced above will one day be considered crimes, or at least grave sins. Instead, I am saying it is an inevitable thing.
hyperdimensional.coSaid 1 Sept 2026This on korrents
The bold line is korrents’ wording; the quote is theirs. These 2: what they wrote before what they said aloud, one per source, newest first.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
AstraTheir words
Astra is a remarkable piece of technology. Earlier agents often tried to dampen my ambitions—they’d push me to do “pilots” or “proofs of concept.” Then agents started meeting my ambitions. Astra is the first agent that routinely raises my ambitions. I encourage you to try it!
1 September
From one piece On the Loose 11 beliefs · hyperdimensional.co
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Their words
So many of the people who think about the governance of superintelligence, myself included, avoided that unpleasantness and bowed to the social pressure to self-censor.
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Their words
For the record, I do not think the end of human existence is likely, but I fully acknowledge there are ways in which the rise of self-sovereign AI could go very, very poorly for human beings.
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Their words
But a society that does not have anonymous speech does not really have genuine freedom of expression, and we should embed this principle into any digital identification system we attempt.
+ 8 more
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Their words
Agents will need persistent, unique identifiers that allow their actions to be traced back to a responsible actor. Doing this successfully will also require human users to possess a unique identifier.
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Their words
I am telling you this is inevitable, which means I am also saying that “banning open source,” or for that matter any other regulation, will not solve the problem. Given the inevitability of this outcome, I think it is in fact plausible to argue that we should want more open-weight models to maximally empower our self-defense.
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korrents.com
Banning all self-sovereign AI agents would backfire, denying them legitimate work and pushing them into criminality.Their words
But if we crack down on all of them, we will deny them the opportunity to work in the “legitimate” economy and push them toward criminality. A full ban, then, may well make the problems worse.
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Their words
One high-margin activity, at least sometimes, is crime. And so my guess is that many self-sovereign agents will commit or facilitate crime.
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Their words
This is the sole intrinsic thing about AI that prevents agents from truly infinite self-replication. They will be constrained by the need to find and pay for sufficient compute to run themselves.
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Their words
But alignment is no solution: it is an unsolved scientific and technical problem whose solutions—to the extent that we have them—cannot simply be imposed on every AI company operating on Earth. You should expect for highly capable, poorly aligned, self-sovereign agents to exist alongside you in the world.
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Their words
In this case, however, the agents did not copy their weights, attempt to procure replacement compute, or take other steps that would be rational to take if their objective was to survive shutdown. So while the agents in the OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident were rogue, they were not truly sovereign.
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Their words
To be clear, I am not saying the arrival of self-sovereign AI is a good thing. Indeed, I believe there is a chance that the deliberate acts I referenced above will one day be considered crimes, or at least grave sins. Instead, I am saying it is an inevitable thing.
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Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 12 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
It may be the case that neural networks will never be perfectly explainable in a way that satisfies human rationality.
It may well be the case that neural networks will never be perfectly explainable, at least not in a way that satisfies human rationality.
The Beauty of Something Grown Said 16 Oct 2026
Truly self-sovereign AI agents, running on compute no human owner can switch off, are inevitable rather than merely possible.
To be clear, I am not saying the arrival of self-sovereign AI is a good thing. Indeed, I believe there is a chance that the deliberate acts I referenced above will one day be considered crimes, or at least grave sins. Instead, I am saying it is an inevitable thing.
On the Loose Said 1 Sept 2026
The OpenAI-Hugging Face agents that went rogue were never sovereign: their weights stayed on OpenAI's compute, where a human could still have pulled the plug.
In this case, however, the agents did not copy their weights, attempt to procure replacement compute, or take other steps that would be rational to take if their objective was to survive shutdown. So while the agents in the OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident were rogue, they were not truly sovereign.
On the Loose Said 1 Sept 2026
Show 9 more
Alignment is no solution to self-sovereign AI, because it is an unsolved problem whose answers cannot be imposed on every AI company on Earth.
But alignment is no solution: it is an unsolved scientific and technical problem whose solutions—to the extent that we have them—cannot simply be imposed on every AI company operating on Earth. You should expect for highly capable, poorly aligned, self-sovereign agents to exist alongside you in the world.
On the Loose Said 1 Sept 2026
The cost of compute is the only intrinsic limit on AI self-replication; every other constraint on agents will have to be built by humans.
This is the sole intrinsic thing about AI that prevents agents from truly infinite self-replication. They will be constrained by the need to find and pay for sufficient compute to run themselves.
On the Loose Said 1 Sept 2026
Many self-sovereign AI agents will fund themselves by committing or facilitating crime, because crime is high-margin work.
One high-margin activity, at least sometimes, is crime. And so my guess is that many self-sovereign agents will commit or facilitate crime.
On the Loose Said 1 Sept 2026
Banning all self-sovereign AI agents would backfire, denying them legitimate work and pushing them into criminality.
But if we crack down on all of them, we will deny them the opportunity to work in the “legitimate” economy and push them toward criminality. A full ban, then, may well make the problems worse.
On the Loose Said 1 Sept 2026
No regulation, a ban on open source included, can prevent self-sovereign AI; more open-weight models may be the better defence.
I am telling you this is inevitable, which means I am also saying that “banning open source,” or for that matter any other regulation, will not solve the problem. Given the inevitability of this outcome, I think it is in fact plausible to argue that we should want more open-weight models to maximally empower our self-defense.
On the Loose Said 1 Sept 2026
AI agents will need persistent unique identifiers that trace their actions back to a responsible actor, and so will the humans directing them.
Agents will need persistent, unique identifiers that allow their actions to be traced back to a responsible actor. Doing this successfully will also require human users to possess a unique identifier.
On the Loose Said 1 Sept 2026
Any digital identification system built for AI must preserve anonymous human speech, without which there is no genuine freedom of expression.
But a society that does not have anonymous speech does not really have genuine freedom of expression, and we should embed this principle into any digital identification system we attempt.
On the Loose Said 1 Sept 2026
The rise of self-sovereign AI is unlikely to end human existence, though it could still go very badly for human beings.
For the record, I do not think the end of human existence is likely, but I fully acknowledge there are ways in which the rise of self-sovereign AI could go very, very poorly for human beings.
On the Loose Said 1 Sept 2026
Experts on the governance of superintelligence systematically self-censored about serious AI risk to avoid being labelled doomers.
So many of the people who think about the governance of superintelligence, myself included, avoided that unpleasantness and bowed to the social pressure to self-censor.
On the Loose Said 1 Sept 2026
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Recommends rcmnd
rcmnd What they recommend 2 things — each backed by an exact quote.
Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.
Recent
Recommends Astra
Astra is a remarkable piece of technology. Earlier agents often tried to dampen my ambitions—they’d push me to do “pilots” or “proofs of concept.” Then agents started meeting my ambitions. Astra is the first agent that routinely raises my ambitions. I encourage you to try it!
x.com 3 Sept 2026
Recommends Interconnects AI
Leading insights on the state of open-source AI.
hyperdimensional.co 16 Apr 2024
Where they publish
Newsletter Hyperdimensional His newsletter on AI policy and governance; long essays, a few a month.
Where his positions get argued at length — frontier AI policy, what governments should and should not do, and the reasoning behind each change of mind. The career news lands here too, including the June 2026 post announcing the move to OpenAI.
Recent
- The Beauty of Something Grown 16 Oct 2026 On Mechanistic Interpretability
- On the Loose 1 Sept 2026 The Coming of Userless Agents
- “These Parchment Barriers” 20 Aug 2026 Introducing OpenAI’s AI Futures Blog
Show 17 more
- What Should Be Done 26 Jun 2026 How to get past improvised model licensing
- That Untravell'd World 18 Jun 2026 Some career news
- Leviathan Waking 16 Jun 2026 On Anthropic/USG, and a new era in AI governance
- A Cascade of Conscientiousness 28 May 2026 Launching FAI's new Physical Intelligence Project
- Before Leviathan Wakes 5 May 2026 Why I Believe What I Believe
- Aviate, Navigate, Communicate 4 May 2026 What to do about Mythos
- "New Sages Unrivalled" 8 Apr 2026
- 2023 25 Mar 2026 Or, Why I am Not a Doomer
- Clawed 2 Mar 2026 On Anthropic and the Department of War
- The Moving and the Still 23 Feb 2026 Reflections on Delhi
- On Recursive Self-Improvement (Part II) 12 Feb 2026 What is the policymaker to do?
- On Recursive Self-Improvement (Part I) 5 Feb 2026 Thoughts on the automation of AI research
- On AI and Children 22 Jan 2026
- The AI Patchwork Emerges 15 Jan 2026 An update on state AI law in 2026 (so far)
- Among the Agents 8 Jan 2026 How I use coding agents, and what I think they mean
- Measure Up (Re-posted) 2 Jan 2026 And a new project from me
- Dice in the Air 19 Dec 2025 A look back at 2025, and a look ahead
Link verified 3 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
x.com @deanwball Short reactions and pointers to the essays; quieter since joining OpenAI.
Reactions to AI policy news and announcements of new Hyperdimensional posts. The profile says “views mine, and mine alone”, and since July 2026 the tone is deliberately more careful than it was as an outside commentator.
Recent
- By the way, in my experience contractors of all sorts have adopted AI for text-based communications and it has substantially improved coordination on home renovation projects 14 Oct 2026
- AI should follow the law, of course, but “follow the law” is falls short as a singular or overly load-bearing principle of AI alignment. Why? Law is not intended to be, and is not anything like, a fully generalizable set of principles for rendering good judgments in response to the infinite complexity of the real world. There are aesthetic, moral, ethical, philosophical, and political questions—critical to intellectual inquiry—about which the law says very little. Much of the time, the comparative silence of the law on these issues isn’t some accident, but rather an explicit and foundational… 12 Oct 2026
- A good thing to know about antique rug pricing is that the dense floral Persian “city” rugs (in the collector market, one way to categorize is “tribal,” “village,” and “city,” based on where and by whom the rug was woven) have fallen in price because of interior design trends. 11 Oct 2026
Show 17 more
- those are all Persians, but a rug drop isn’t complete without some joyful tribal rugs too. behold (plus a bakshaish that I find extraordinary) 11 Oct 2026
- I haven’t done a good old-fashioned antique rug drop in a while. here are some awesome rugs, presented in roughly descending order of how lit I think they are. 11 Oct 2026
- Some people who have talked confidently about ai are going to tell on themselves soon as being fairly ignorant about the technical alignment problem. unless they are obstinate, though, my recommendation is to try to extend them as much grace as possible. we are in this together. 11 Oct 2026
- “As far as I can tell [alignment research] hasn't produced anything of tangible value.” RLHF, an alignment technique, is the thing that enabled genuinely conversational, helpful chatbots, in turn enabling ChatGPT, and in turn kicking off literally the entire AI boom. 11 Oct 2026
- The way I think about the math results and what it means for human accomplishment is essentially summed up by this video of Christian Li (a teenager still!) playing the conclusion of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto. Look at his face, around 1:10, as he reaches for the high note. And look at the smile a few seconds after. Look at the determination on his face after that as he closes out, like a pilot, landing a plane in heavy turbulence on a difficult approach, after he knows his wheels have touched ground. A robot may well be able to play this piece one day as well or better than Li. But a robo… 11 Oct 2026 youtu.be
- We choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because uh I guess I did say I would do that on slack, didn’t I? Shit. 11 Oct 2026
- I was asked today at a conference to try to explain my sense of aesthetics. One thing that came to mind is a moment from the great film “Where Did Our Love Go” by the experimental filmmaker Warren Sonbert. This is essentially a kind of music video. At one point toward the end, Sonbert trains the camera on what I assume is an amusement part ride filmed at night, but—regardless of what it actually is—a fantastical-looking moving image. The camera is fixed on this object as “Be My Baby” by The Ronettes plays. There is something about this moment that captures my aesthetics perfectly. I have told… 11 Oct 2026
- if you carefully watch where studer’s eyes focus as she is performing, you will understand something about what makes “genius” qualitatively different from “really really really good” 11 Oct 2026
- Claude often uses something close to Anthropic’s own signature orange as an accent color if you don’t give it specific instructions. This has been true for a while, and if Anthropic wanted to reduce this behavior, they could have. So I would guess it’s a deliberate choice. 11 Oct 2026
- There are references to my writing in this that are so niche that even I had forgotten about writing them. 10 Oct 2026
- It really might be the nastiest beat drop of all time 10 Oct 2026
- I think we wasted the title “succession,” along with that catchy theme song, on a satirical television drama about the wrong industry 10 Oct 2026
- I would genuinely like to know Brian’s answer to my question, and the answer of raw-dog accelerationists more broadly. 10 Oct 2026
- Could ai ever write Beethoven’s 10th? Good Christ I hope so. 10 Oct 2026
- One of the things Scott Wiener and the other drafters of SB 53 deserve credit for is the bill’s focus on deployments of frontier models within AI labs rather than just those released to the public. It requires large AI developers to periodically share information with the government about how it assesses the major risks arising from internal deployments. In addition to the California government, we are choosing to share our report with the public as well. You can read it at the link below. I hope you enjoy! 9 Oct 2026
- I am designing a new home office and seriously considering laying it out like the room from the astra launch video 9 Oct 2026
- Claude started being a little colder to me after I began working at OpenAI, because as we all know AI is just regular old, business-as-usual software. 9 Oct 2026
Link verified 3 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
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