Ground Zero: Frontier Research to Policy Startup

Published on October 14, 2026 1:53 PM GMT Status: chronological: these are thoughts based on my time working in the US Senate and House. I find this a useful map for me personally. novelty: I don’t think these ideas are conceptually novel for practitioners who are deep in the weeds on frontier AI policy. epistemic: This post would be difficult for someone to invalidate — part of my argument is that people who can succeed in policy are extremely incentivized to not disclose their models and worldviews. I have been personally successful in US AI policy (e.g. wrote the first draft of the Hawley-Blumenthal AI Risk Evaluation Act of 2025). If you think the argument is plausible, then that supports discounting someone who disagrees with the thesis. I don’t have a good solution for that. professional: I am working on a for-profit state capacity project. The most skeptical response to this post is probably “You’re literally pulling the same move that Leopold Aschenbrenner did by claiming you are uniquely proximate to events that will inevitably change the world while also running a for-profit entity that would enable you to make massive amounts of money if we buy your thesis.” The Setup A lot of people want to get into frontier AI policy, and I have some bad news. Frontier AI policy isn’t a field. It’s not something you can get into. There’s nothing you can read that will tell you what to do, why to do it, and how to do it. Look around you; everyone who has any idea of what might work is currently trying to implement it; the state of the art is locked down in legacy outlook email & tattered field notebooks. And it gets worse. You might think that you can dive into the work that is public, the bills that have been introduced, the executive orders that have been signed, the concrete policy wins that other people are promoting as the right thing to do. But you can’t take any of that at face value. Technical researchers and engineers are used to extremely high transparency contexts — you can audit an algorithm and study source code. The one professional field that is well suited to approaching policy strategically is the legal field — law is extremely opaque, there is virtually no transparency into the inner workings of legal conflicts, and thus far harder to assess the competence of lawyers. This is also why we can’t just hire armies of lawyers to work on these problems and expect that to work. But, there’s good news. (Call to action in the postscript!) The Bitter Lesson of Policy The bitter lesson of policy is that it doesn’t matter how much money you throw at lobbying to accomplish your goals; in the long run, the most resilient institutions will win. The US Constitution was created in 1789, and has had 3 major revisions since then that stand out to me personally: The Marshall Court: the Supreme Court from 1801-1835 under Chief Justice Marshall. He gave SCOTUS judicial review and made it an equal branch to the Congress and the Presidency. Reconstruction: the period of rebuilding the USA after the civil war, largely remembered as the time 4 million freed slaves constituting 12% of the total US population were integrated into society. Presidency as Sovereignty: the balance of power in the American federal government has become increasingly & overwhelmingly concentrated in the individual person of the President. A reasonable assessment of the US Constitution is that despite the best of intentions, the framers ultimately failed to craft a balance of powers and have led to a world they would have hated. Another reasonable assessment is that the US Constitution is the single most brilliant piece of legal architecture in the history of mankind, that has stood the test of time and evolved alongside the most powerful nation in the world. An unreasonable assessment would be to claim that any of the politicking around the specific concerns people had about their lives in the 1800’s actually matters to us in 2026. Maybe it did — maybe you can prove that advocating for a certain regulatory strategy on printing presses is the pivotal legal implementation that enabled the 1st amendment to have the broad, fundamental role it does now in 2026. That would be an incredibly helpful and useful analysis, and I am extremely excited to read it. Until then, my corollary to the bitter lesson is the bootstrap hypothesis: the expected value of all policy on the long-term future lies in the effect of your policy engagement on the norms, institutions, and people around you. Yes, this is different because we have a few years, not 200. But I don’t think that matters. Unless you can solve inner and outer alignment with purely technical means,  any AI control solution will involve a legal architecture. Short timelines and fast takeoff imply you should prioritize the long-term resilience of that legal architecture, since you will quickly become obsolete. As policymakers are accelerated with AI, the amount of policy research, analysis, and impl