Dean Ball's Substack dated 1st September 2026 (emphasis mine):

I want to close on a personal note. This is the first time I am writing about this issue in quite these terms, and yet I am telling you it is inevitable. Why have I taken so long to cover this issue? Well, I have brought up the topic of digital identification for humans and agents a few times over the years, and when I did so I was largely motivated by the concerns I’ve shared here. But it is true that I—and candidly I think many of my colleagues in the profession of AI policy—largely failed to talk about this issue with the level of seriousness and urgency it required. I think there are two main reasons for this failure.

First, this stuff is weird and off-putting, and many of us felt an incentive to meet our audiences in their comfort zone rather than ours. So among “serious people” (or would-be serious people), there was a general tendency to confine candid discussion about what most of us believe our near-term future will be like to private venues. We let our hair down in Signal chats and the little nooks of Lighthaven, but when the public was watching, we spoke in more abstract, tamer-sounding terms about it all. This was especially pernicious in 2024 and 2025, when it was essentially impossible to acknowledge any serious AI risk without being labeled a “doomer.”

I am just as guilty of this as my colleagues, if not more so. The thing is that it’s unpleasant to be screamed at for being a “crazy doomer” who wants to enact worldwide fascism (and similar, and worse). Being constantly labeled in this way also limits one’s influence. 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. I’ve stopped doing so, in part because I grew tired of the discursive straitjacket and in part because I now have an eight-month-old baby boy into whose eyes I must look every day.

…

I want to apologize for my personal failure to communicate in sufficiently serious terms about the specifics of self-sovereign AI, which I now understand to have been an enormous gap in my writing and speaking. Going forward, I will try to notice more readily when I am biting my tongue or, even worse, shutting my eyes.

USAID took down its archive of evaluation reports, but a high school student happened to have downloaded them for a ML project, and they are now available online again:

https://www.aiddata.org/blog/before-reimagining-development-data-remember-what-weve-learned

A one year review (published June 2025)

I tried draft/auction leagues, and while the draft/auction itself was incredibly fun, I found that there was never much action afterwards, trade offers were always treated suspiciously (adverse selection!)

And in regular FPL you still have to consider cost-effectiveness, consensus thinking, and have the same constraints as everyone else playing - which I like

FPL? Join our (pitifully small) minileague: 6dqpgs

Try Impact Books:

https://impactbooks.store/

Sorry I don't know who runs it or any other information

Yikes

At the end of the book, Jensen berates his biographer for asking too many questions about AI safety. In Stephen Witt’s final interview with him, Jensen unleashed “twenty minutes” of “uncontained, omni-directional, and wildly inappropriate” shouting. The anger was sparked when Witt showed him a 1964 Arthur C. Clarke video predicting future AI systems that will “out-think their makers.” Witt asked whether humanity was prepared for the potential risks that could arrive in such a world. Jensen was not happy:

“This cannot be a ridiculous sci-fi story,” he said. He gestured to his frozen PR reps at the end of the table. “Do you guys understand? I didn’t grow up on a bunch of sci-fi stories, and this is not a sci-fi movie. These are serious people doing serious work!” he said. “This is not a freaking joke! This is not a repeat of Arthur C. Clarke. I didn’t read his fucking books. I don’t care about those books! It’s not– we’re not a sci-fi repeat! This company is not a manifestation of Star Trek! We are not doing those things! We are serious people, doing serious work. And – it’s just a serious company, and I’m a serious person, just doing serious work.”

Another horse analogy from an Anthropic researcher:

https://x.com/andy_l_jones/status/1998060552565002721

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1998060552565002721.html

Elon Musk strongly agrees with this on the Dwarkesh podcast:

Elon Musk
…
I somewhat disagree with the AI companies that are C-corp or B-corp trying to generate profit as much, as possible or revenue as much as possible, saying they’re labs.
They’re not labs. A lab is a sort of quasi-communist thing at universities. They’re corporations. Let me see your incorporation documents. Oh, okay. You’re a B or C-corp or whatever.
…
Dwarkesh Patel

What’s xAI’s plan to stay on the compute ramp up that all the labs are doing right now? The labs are on track to spend over $50-200 billion.

Elon Musk

You mean the corporations? The labs are at universities and they’re moving like a snail.

Dwarkesh Patel

They’re not spending $50 billion.

Elon Musk

You mean the revenue maximizing corporations… that call themselves labs.
…
John Collison

What will xAI’s business be? Is it going to be consumer, enterprise? What’s the mix of those things going to be? Is it going to be similar to other labs—

Elon Musk

You’re saying “labs”. Corporations.

I want to signal-boost this conversation between you and @Wei Dai (and others), and see whether you have any further thoughts on the matter