OpenAI Wants to Talk About The Federalist Papers
OpenAI Wants to Talk About The Federalist Papers
摘要: Technology
OpenAI Wants to Talk About
The Federalist Papers
The AI giant is worried about what all-powerful bots could mean for our constitutional
正文
Technology
OpenAI Wants to Talk About
The Federalist Papers
The AI giant is worried about what all-powerful bots could mean for our constitutional rights.
Matteo Wong
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Joe Sohm / Visions of America / Getty; Smith Collection / Gado / Getty.
September 4, 2026, 1:01 PM ET
Late last month, OpenAI launched a rather grand mission: nothing less than defending individual political freedom in an age of all-powerful machines. The company’s “Strategic Futures” team has styled itself, in a sense, as inheriting the task of America’s Founding Fathers: “We labor in service of the ideals of free expression and individual liberty that are enshrined in the humble parchment of the U.S. Constitution,” Dean Ball, the team’s leader, wrote in a new OpenAI blog post. (The
opens with a quote from James Madison in
The Federalist Papers
.)
Ball worries that advanced AI could radically concentrate power in the hands of those who control it, displacing labor in ways that disempower humans. In an extreme scenario, governments will have no need to listen to their citizens if there are robots to wage wars and omniscient software to run the bureaucracy. Ball is interested in studying what new political institutions might be needed to avoid this fate.
Many Americans—a majority of whom express distrust toward the AI industry, outrage about data centers, and fears about their job security—already seem to be feeling this
loss of agency
very deeply. And the AI boom has already generated enormous amounts of wealth in just a handful of tech companies—including OpenAI itself. To say the least, it’s paradoxical for one of the most influential companies in the world’s most powerful industry to decry the AI-enabled concentration of power. So I reached out to Ball to understand more about his unease about the industry he works in, and how he wants to see the United States adapt to AI.
Ball, who studies AI policy, is something of a minor