Dean Ball on Who Should Control AI

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.7 • 963 Ratings

🗓️ 7 March 2026

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Yascha Mounk and Dean Ball examine how the fight over autonomous weapons and mass surveillance reveals the impossible choices facing American AI policy. Dean W. Ball served as Senior Policy Advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he was the primary staff drafter of America’s AI Action Plan. He writes the AI-focused newsletter Hyperdimensional. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Dean Ball discuss the clash between Anthropic and the Department of War over AI usage restrictions, why mass domestic surveillance capabilities make AI governance so challenging, and how to regulate transformative technologies under conditions of radical uncertainty. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following ⁠this link on your phone⁠. Email: leonora.barclay@persuasion.community Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay. Connect with us! ⁠Spotify⁠ | ⁠Apple⁠ | ⁠Google⁠ X: ⁠@Yascha_Mounk⁠ & ⁠@JoinPersuasion⁠ YouTube: ⁠Yascha Mounk⁠, ⁠Persuasion⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is brought to you by Vanta.
0:03.0	Security and compliance done wrong is a headache.
0:06.0	Done right, you build trust and grow faster.
0:08.0	That's Vanta.
0:09.0	For startups, Vanta acts as your first security hire,
0:13.0	using AI to get you compliant fast.
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0:18.0	risk and automating workflows.
0:20.0	From startups like Cursor to enterprises like Snowflake, top companies choose Vantor.
0:24.6	Do security and compliance right.
0:26.6	Get started today at Vantor.com.
0:29.6	We will not govern AI without AI.
0:33.6	That's a weird fact, but it's like also kind of trivially obvious if you think about other general purpose technologies.
0:41.3	Imagine trying to govern computers without computers.
0:45.3	And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
0:49.3	There are so many things going on in the world at the moment that it is hard to keep track.
0:59.9	We had a great episode with Francis Fukuyama trying to understand the escalating conflict in the Middle East.
1:06.7	I invite you to listen back to that episode if you haven't yet.
1:10.0	But the big thing that was going on just before this war started was the extraordinary
1:14.9	conflict between Entropic, the maker of Claude, one of the frontier AI labs, and the
1:22.8	organization formerly known as the Department of Defense, now known as the Department of War.
1:28.0	There was a very public, extraordinary conflict over whether and tropic was going to be allowed
	...

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