Former Trump and Biden AI advisers Dean Ball and Ben Buchanan urge bipartisan action on AI security risks, including tighter export controls and safety audits
New York Times
Context & Ripple Effects
The call from Dean Ball and Ben Buchanan extends a bipartisan AI-policy thread already reflected in a Senate framework for major R&D, privacy and governance measures. It also precedes more concrete House proposals requiring risk-management plans from leading developers.
The focus on export controls and audits connects AI governance to national-security control over advanced capabilities, rather than treating safety solely as a voluntary lab practice.
First-order effects
The advisers’ intervention adds cross-administration support for tighter controls on advanced AI access and formal safety auditing, increasing pressure on policymakers and frontier developers to treat security evaluation as a governance requirement.
Export-control policy and model-safety oversight become linked in the same agenda: restrictions on who can obtain capabilities would sit alongside scrutiny of how those capabilities are tested and managed.
Second-order effects
Congressional proposals requiring top developers’ risk-management plans gain a clearer security-policy rationale, while developers face stronger incentives to build auditable evaluation and governance processes.
Labs’ policy positions become more consequential: OpenAI’s later proposal for mandatory, CAISI-led cyber evaluations shows that the institutional design of oversight—not only whether it exists—will be contested.
Third-order effects
If bipartisan support translates into durable rules, frontier AI development may increasingly operate through a state-compatible model in which access, cyber risk and internal governance are treated as connected national-security concerns.
The unresolved question is whether federal policy can establish common audit and risk-management expectations without producing a fragmented system of federal, state and company-specific compliance regimes.
The trend: AI policy is shifting from broad safety principles toward security-centered governance that combines model evaluation, risk-management duties and control over access to advanced capabilities.
Dean calls for mandated audits of AI company's safety claims. I think this is quite reasonable. I also think it's secondary to using AI (and non-AI methods) to secure the wider world. It's simply too easy to build a near-frontier model. No matter how solid the safety
Clear article on bipartisan consensus, with some mandatory chyna hypocrisy. We all know American-Israeli AI ambitions, luridly advertised at the start of this war in Iran, for example. I'll be plain, these people shouldn't «control A.I.'s future» if humanity is to ever be free. […
This article should serve as a wake-up call for both policymakers and the general public. AI capabilities have been growing fast; models already exist today that could substantially aid hackers in conducting a cyberattack on critical infrastructure; other risks (like bio) are ri…
Today, @BuchananBen and I co-author a piece in the New York Times with a simple message: While we disagree on plenty, we believe AI has national security implications which deserve a careful and bipartisan government response. We can (and should) have partisan fights about all m…
@xeophon @BuchananBen I struggle to imagine the mechanism by which an audit of a company would “gut” open source. I'm a pretty ardent supporter of open-weight models but it's also not reasonable to use open-weight as a reason for reflexive opposition to all AI regulation.
Jensen Huang wants to sell more chips to China because that's good for his business. But American compute should go to American labs. Strengthening export controls on AI chips and manufacturing equipment is a national security imperative to keep the US ahead of China.
Important piece in the NYT today from @deanwball & @BuchananBen. Mythos found zero-day vulnerabilities in every single browser and operating system, full stop. Imagine if China had reached that capability before we had the chance to patch our systems. [image]
Ben was President Biden's AI Czar. I might disagree with some of his decisions, forecasts, and priorities, but we have also found many areas of overlap, especially in catastrophic risk related areas. More importantly, I have found Ben to be a tireless and ardent patriot.