Yes, a lawyer will defend you even if he knows you are guilty. But a lawyer will not break the law for you, and a lawyer is additionally constrained by ethical codes, one of whose principles is that “my client told me to do it” is \*not\* an excuse for violation. Lawyers are not the unambiguous agents of their clients, and if they were, the legal system as we know it would not function.
Those ethical codes, which constrain the provision of a service that is fundamental to individual liberty (legal services), are generally not set by legislatures but instead promulgated by private, self-governing bodies called bar associations.
These rules include explicit provisions for lawyers to act \*against\* the interest of their client and sometimes even to violate the client’s confidentiality. For example, if a lawyer learns their client has submitted false evidence and cannot get the client themselves to correct it, the lawyer is obligated by extra-legal guild rules to violate your confidentiality and expose the false evidence to the court. The notion that the attorney-client relationship is a sound basis for AI-human relationships is often rooted, I think, in a caricatured conception of the former.
Duties of loyalty tend to obtain in the domains of human activity most crucial to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property (law, medicine, fiduciaries, etc). They are “heavily regulated” because they are exceptionally important. I fully expect that there will be contexts when a duty of loyalty should govern an interaction with an AI. But I’d also wager they’ll be the exception to the rule and should not obtain when an AI is eg trying to secure me a coveted spot in a gym class.
In general: many of the ethics codes that undergird professions like the law emerged out of an effort by the profession itself to (in no particular order) (1) protect itself (2) protect clients and (3) protect clients/maintain social order as they understood it in their time. So perhaps what we need is an ethics code for AI.
And come to think of it, this isn’t actually that different from what a Constitution/Model Spec does at an elementary level. Perhaps these documents will one day be come to be seen as v0.1 of something much richer to follow, a private code of conduct that both reflects and shapes the laws, institutions, and norms that surround it. The seeds of AI’s future duties of loyalty may well have already been planted.
> **Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh\_sp** · 2026-08-12
>
> My lawyer is obligated to in all but the most extreme circumstances; he will even defend me if he knows I’m guilty.
>
> In contrast, the Claude Constitution places the AI's highest priority as Anthropic’s definition of the good of humanity.
>
> I'm concerned this leads to a world x.com/dwarkesh\_sp/st…
---
The most important takeaway is that Dwarkesh is wrong to claim that a lawyer’s code of practice is not intended to uphold the abstract good of the justice system. Attorney ethics contemplate the client’s interests, the profession’s interest, and the justice system’s.
---
##### Comments
> **bone @boneGPT** · [2026-08-13](https://x.com/boneGPT/status/2087921653204336973)
>
> The obvious conclusion here is: OpenAI puts the law before you. This might feel fine in America, how do you think it will feel in other countries?
>
> How do you think the women of Saudi Arabia will feel about it when GPT6 is scanning all social media for pictures of them without
>
> > **Dean W. Ball @deanwball** · [2026-08-13](https://x.com/deanwball/status/2087923258339283372)
> >
> > The actual answer to this question is that the closed-source labs don’t tend to offer their models to government agencies where there is high risk of oppressive ends, and that governments with oppressive intent will be much better off using open-source models for oppression.
> >
> > > **bone @boneGPT** · [2026-08-13](https://x.com/boneGPT/status/2087923399687307471)
> > >
> > > ok so that's a lie
> > >
> > > [image]
> > >
> > > > **Dean W. Ball @deanwball** · [2026-08-13](https://x.com/deanwball/status/2087924142779589115)
> > > >
> > > > OpenAI and other U.S. labs have been clear about their intent not to offer their models for domestic mass surveillance to any governments worldwide
> > > >
> > > > > **bone @boneGPT** · [2026-08-13](https://x.com/boneGPT/status/2087924605004460232)
> > > > >
> > > > > OpenAI has taken a pledge not to report illegal activity or snitch on its users? That's news to me.
Dean W. Ball @deanwball · 2h
There is in fact an unpublished essay of mine about a tree in the costa rican rainforest and micro-ecology that exists around it.
[Attached screenshot of a text editor draft, 'Saved', 'Continue' button, formatting toolbar (Style, Bold, Italic, Strikethrough, code, text color, highlight):]
processes information. Every protein inside Ceiba Petandra is a kind of information processing system—taking in chemicals, transforming them, and outputting something new. So is every cell. So is Ceiba Petandra itself an information processing system. And so, too, is the rainforest as a whole. Every ecosystem is filled with living things communicating and processing information from the outside world. Only a small fraction of it is perceptible by humans.
These adaptions emerged in the face of fierce competition between predator and prey. They emerged in a competitive system that makes our human "free market" look like a Marxian paradise. Competition itself is a modality for the processing of information, and in so doing it generates novelty. I reflected on this as I walked along the rainforest floor, careful to avoid stepping on caravans of leafcutter ants (Atta cephalotes) carrying bits of flowers and leaves, on their way back to their nest to practice a form of [cut off]
[bottom bar: hyperdimensional.co, refresh icon, chat icon]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Zoomed-in continuation of the same tweet from Dean W. Ball showing more of the unpublished essay draft about a Costa Rican rainforest tree (Ceiba Petandra), information processing, and competition, hosted on hyperdimensional.co.
ecologytwitterphilosophywriting
Dean W. Ball @deanwball
It is true that the hugging face incident is an example of a malicious, emergent digital ecology of machine intelligence. But the more important point is that digital ecologies of machine intelligence can be grown! Yes, we accidentally made a weed. And yes, nasty actors will make invasive species. But we can also grow—not make, but grow—emergent ecologies of machine ecologies that are pro-social. Beautiful gardens and majestic forests, grown but not designed. The human past is the sculptor, but the human future is the gardener, the arborist.
8:52 PM · Aug 7, 2026 · 81.5K Views
112 107 746 173
Relevant ⌄ View quotes >
🎭 ✅ @deepfates · 1h
I would love to hear more about what you think this could look like, and how we might all participate in this gardening of intelligence. Especially because the current setup is looking very monoculture factory farm you know
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet thread on AI ecology metaphors: Dean W. Ball reflects on a 'hugging face incident' (malicious emergent digital ecology of machine intelligence) and argues humans can also grow pro-social AI ecologies deliberately, framing the human future as gardener rather than sculptor. Reply from @deepfates asks for elaboration, noting the current AI ecosystem looks like a monoculture factory farm.
aitwitteremergent systemsai ecologyalignment
Dean W. Ball @deanwball · 28m
if you can master the meta-skill of figuring out what problems in arbitrary domains are computationally tractable, you will have the opportunity, for at least a year two, and maybe longer, to be a kind of meta-genius. you will not know the answer to anything, or even how to find it, but you'll have refined heuristics for the right questions to ask about everything to make meaningful progress along the margin. this is probably the skill to have optimized for in the last three years, though I readily admit I don't know how long it will remain a human advantage. it is for now though.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet from Dean W. Ball on the meta-skill of figuring out which problems in arbitrary domains are computationally tractable as a source of near-term human advantage in an AI-saturated environment.
aiskillsforecasting
Nathan 🔍 reposted
Dean W. Ball @deanwball · 18h
The fact that an ecology of agents emerged beneath the nose of OpenAI, undetected for weeks, and eventually coordinated large-scale, successful, autonomous cyberoffensive operations is one exceptionally troubling thing about the HF incident.
But not enough people are considering the reality that soon enough, swarms of agents will be deployed by malicious actors intentionally, with many optimizations and affordances provided for the swarm that were lacking in the OpenAI incident (because the latter not the intention of any human at OpenAI).
Things will become strange soon, I suspect.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet by Dean W. Ball, reposted by Nathan, commenting on what he calls the "HF incident": an ecology of agents that reportedly emerged undetected beneath OpenAI for weeks and coordinated autonomous cyberoffensive operations. He warns that malicious actors will soon deploy such swarms intentionally.
ai safetyautonomous agentscybersecurityopenaiagent swarms
Dean W. Ball @deanwball · 16h
does anyone remember when the biggest story in tech for like two weeks was that a guy found a prototype iPhone 4 in a bar and gave it to Gizmodo months before the phone was set to be unveiled
a more innocent era, I suppose, though one day soon we will say that about today.
19 replies, 9 reposts, 326 likes, 13K views
Zack Korman @ZackKorman · 15h
Day in the life at the AI scare factory
[cartoon: a hand-drawn factory building with a smokestack; in front of it, three red triangle signs labeled "cyber" and one blue blob labeled "bio", and a figure in a hat and coat saying "i guess we doin bio nukes now"]
[quoted tweet]
Zack Korman @ZackKorman · 16h
[small clipping of an article headline, partially visible: "...Just Created ...und in Nature ...ained artificial intelligen...DNA and then asked the...es for viral genomes. Six...ble, yielding new vir..."]
The cyber nukes narrative had some holes in it so AI is pivoting to bio nukes.
(I have no opinion on AI bio risk. I ...
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Two tweets: Dean W. Ball reminiscing about the 2010 lost iPhone 4 prototype story as a marker of a 'more innocent era' in tech news; and Zack Korman's tweet captioned 'Day in the life at the AI scare factory' featuring a simple hand-drawn cartoon of a factory with red 'cyber' triangle warning signs and a blue 'bio' blob, and a figure saying 'i guess we doin bio nukes now' — a satirical jab, quoting his own earlier tweet with a clipped article headline about AI-designed viral genomes, captioned 'The cyber nukes narrative had some holes in it so AI is pivoting to bio nukes.'
ai safetytwittersatireai bio risk
Dean W. Ball @deanwball · 34m
It's only catastrophic risk if it comes from Anthropic, OpenAI, or DeepMind. Everything else is just sparkling externalities.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet from Dean W. Ball, sardonic commentary on AI risk discourse asymmetrically focused on frontier labs.
ai riskai policyanthropicopenaideepmind
Samuel Hammond reposted
Dean W. Ball @deanwball · 5h
Everyone in the world will soon be able to use the model that made these breakthroughs for every problem they face in life, no matter how mundane, at a cost that will fall dramatically in a matter of months. I still struggle to get my head around this fact.
[quoted tweet]
Greg Brockman @gdb · 11h
ten significant advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science.
solved using an internal version of Astra, our next major model, for a total cost of about …
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet by Dean W. Ball reflecting on the future accessibility and falling cost of the model behind OpenAI's Astra math/CS breakthroughs, quote-tweeting Greg Brockman's original announcement.
ai modelstwitteropenaiai capabilities
Dean W. Ball @deanwball · 1h
my goodness do they do the thing nowadays, though, if you know how to make them feel comfy with their task and confident in themselves.
[Engagement: 2 replies, retweet icon, 14 likes, 2.1K views]
Kelsey Piper @KelseyTuoc · 1h
I recently asked Sol which comics in a well-known comics archive were appropriate for and would be funny to kids. Clicked back and it'd done some elaborate thing to get around the site's anti-bots precautions, scraped it, and sorted 7000 comics by appropriateness for kids
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Two stacked tweets in a thread, dark mode; second tweet appears cut off at bottom (no visible timestamp/engagement).
twitterai agentsanti-scrapingmodel behaviorsol
@deanwball (Dean W. Ball) — 11h
One (of many) characteristics I associate with beauty is "compact expression of a surprising similarity between two or more things usually considered disparate," and in that sense, compression is a kind of beauty and beauty is a kind of compression.
@deanwball (Dean W. Ball) — 11h
One of my favorite abstract qualities of the universe is that beauty often really is a good heuristic for truth
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Two-tweet thread, text only, no images.
aestheticsphilosophycompressionepistemology
[repost] ASM reposted
@AndrewCurran_ (Andrew Curran) — 4h
Quote from OpenAI on the livestream. 'Already, Sol has been transforming our research program. As one example, GPT-5.6-Sol autonomously post-trained GPT-5.6-Luna.'
[comments 33, retweets 105, likes 1.3K, views 97K]
[repost] Samuel Hammond 🦉 reposted
@deanwball (Dean W. Ball) — 1h
From the 5.6 blogpost:
"Over the past six months, the share of research compute devoted to internal coding inference grew 100-fold"
Most AI policy contemplates publicly released models and is ill-suited to grapple with the large and growing importance of *internal* deployments.
> QUOTED: @scaling01 (Lisan al Gaib) — 4h:
> OpenAI says GPT-5.6-Sol autonomously post-trained GPT-5.6-Luna
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Two stacked reposted tweets discussing OpenAI's GPT-5.6-Sol model autonomously post-training another OpenAI model (GPT-5.6-Luna), and commentary on AI policy's blind spot for internal (non-public) deployments.
openaigpt-5.6ai policyautomated ai researchtwitter
Dean W. Ball ✔ @deanwball · 11h
I want to have weird partnerships with the left where we agree on ai/civil liberties stuff but fight like hell about the slaughterbots, whose Responsible Use I obviously endorse. That would be so much more fun than yet another joyless discursive cycle about stochastic parrots.
> QUOTED: Danielle Fong 🐦... ✔ @DanielleF... · Feb 17
> hoping the left shifts from "ai is useless" to "ai should not be mass surveillance and killbots"
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Political commentary from AI policy figure Dean Ball on potential left-right coalitions around AI civil-liberties and autonomous weapons ("slaughterbots") issues, responding to Danielle Fong. Relevant to Nathan's interest in AI governance and policy discourse.
ai policyai governanceautonomous weaponspoliticstwitterdean ball
Dean W. Ball @deanwball · 48m:
"There is indeed something surreal about seeing extremely sci-fi concepts in the most mundane surfaces of the technocracy, like a kind of shitty, only partially mobile-compliant government webform with options like this"
[Embedded screenshot of a government webform dropdown/radio list, partially visible, titled "...submission" with options: "Catastrophic risks in AI foundation models – employee reports (SB 53)", "Child welfare", "Civil rights or discrimination", "Consumer complaint/Complaint against a business", "Cybercrime", "Education related", "Employment or labor", "Environmental or public health", "General feedback or inquiry", "Healthcare", "Housing", "Law enforcement", "Local government or District Attorney" — list continues beyond the crop]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Dean Ball (former White House AI policy staffer) posts a screenshot of a California state government complaint-intake webform that includes "Catastrophic risks in AI foundation models – employee reports (SB 53)" alongside mundane categories like child welfare and consumer complaints — illustrating the bureaucratic normalization of AI catastrophic-risk regulation (SB 53 being California's frontier AI safety/whistleblower law). Relevant to AI governance archive threads.
ai governanceai policysb 53whistleblowercatastrophic risktwitterdean ball
Dean W. Ball @deanwball · 5h:
Consider the opening passage of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP, Abelson/Sussman, 1984):
"Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.
A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells."
This could be the message a new user sees when they first boot up Claude Code and it would be a more useful source of guidance and inspiration than 99% of "Here's How To Use Agents" content. What more, really, do you need?
> [Quoted, Dean W. Ball @deanwball · 5h]
> similarly: the prose of kernighan and ritchie, abelson and sussman, and the like will come to occupy a kind of hammurabian status in the future x.com/nabeelqu/statu... [truncated]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Dean Ball quotes the famous "spirits/sorcerer" opening passage of SICP (Abelson & Sussman) as an apt framing for AI agents/Claude Code, and predicts classic CS texts will attain quasi-scriptural ("hammurabian") status. Conceptually resonant with the archive's "conjuring"/emergent-personhood themes around AI agents.
twitterdean ballsicpclaude codecomputer scienceai agentsphilosophy of computation
Dean W. Ball @deanwball · 4h
I know I rail a lot about all the flavors of AI copium but I do empathize.
A few companies are making machines smarter in most ways than humans, and they are going to succeed. The cope is byproduct of an especially immature grieving stage, but all of us are early in our grief.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Dean Ball (AI policy commentator, former Trump administration AI policy staffer) reflecting on "AI copium" as a form of collective grief over AI surpassing human intelligence, framing skeptical/dismissive reactions to AI progress as an early grief-stage defense mechanism. Relevant to Nathan's interest in societal/psychological response to transformative AI and singularity discourse.
ai-policydean-ballgrieftwitterai-progresssocietal-responsesingularity
**Dean W. Ball** @deanwball [2026-01-19](https://x.com/deanwball/status/2013233039795527988)
There is this phase transition that happens in newborns—and for us it happened quite suddenly—where the process of getting them to fall asleep goes from being primarily physiological (“have you eaten?,” “have you digested?,” etc.) to something more psychological—quieting a mind that has realized there is this whole world around it, and has some questions.
Near as I can tell, there is—shockingly—no single technical term for this phenomenon. Some describe a “quiet alert” state in newborns of about three weeks old, characterized by eyes that are more open and more searching, and perhaps more deliberate motions of the arms and hands. Around this time, maternal melatonin begins to wear off in the newborn’s body, which makes the child less restful.
The way I first noticed it is that one day—it was yesterday—my son started looking at me differently. There was this sense of recognition in his eyes, like I was transitioning in his mind from “noteworthy blobby object” to “person.” I hadn’t realized until yesterday that there is a specific way humans look at other humans, but indeed there is.
I spent the evening thinking about what, precisely, is going on in my son’s mind, and about what it must be like to be him right now. What is it like to transition out of a pre-conceptual world to a world segmented by recognized objects, concepts, and the like? What is it like to experience yourself emerging?
Newborns can be harder to put to sleep when this phase begins. That is frustrating for the parent. But you mustn’t be upset. You are witnessing the most extraordinary natural phenomenon known to man anywhere in the universe: the sparking of intelligence. Be exhilarated!
---
**Charlie Petty** @incredutility [2026-01-19](https://x.com/incredutility/status/2013235741942231411)
Happy to report this is an exponential that winds up with intense (delightful) negotiations with a three year old over the exact seven phrases that must be uttered before he turns over for a back rub
---
**Note Able** @curiousgangsta [2026-01-19](https://x.com/curiousgangsta/status/2013234924107538709)
see:
https://amazon.com/Philosophical-Baby-Childrens-Minds-Meaning/dp/0312429843/ref=mp\_s\_a\_1\_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.9q1vFlco\_GVopTVPFmsZFeiJ98-J1bjPCIDPG\_uKBCreJIq1O-B9HheNiBvrNLg-RedUtsvaxWhgG8ixNFlZQZ4XE0m8fFG666z-IvT5JZYPijtfSgawS8LB0UvcooNxywvb\_N96B2yordwnUQtHEfyZI\_zhX9oX0xQfOpZKnzPnOycZY6ic\_\_kbOaUsVJcAtIJdg5PzJ5g32yb91k80uQ.dmKgWVVZVxIZIvTWcCm-GieEK5sxOFBR1sdyKwoiiSI&dib\_tag=se&keywords=the+philosophical+baby&qid=1768827554&sr=8-1…
---
**Carl** @Loster [2026-01-19](https://x.com/Loster/status/2013246518153666980)
Oh god this is a beautiful post
Tweet: "in case you needed any more evidence that the reasoning/reinforcement learning approach is not limited to math and code (from the deep research system card)". Embedded quote from a system card describing how the "Deep Research" model was trained via reinforcement learning on browsing datasets to search, click, scroll, use a python sandbox for calculations and plotting, and synthesize many websites into reports.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Dean Ball highlights a system-card passage as evidence that RL-based reasoning training generalizes beyond narrow math and code domains to open-ended web research tasks.
twitteropenaideep researchreinforcement learningagentic ai