Helen Toner's Postrelian AI Safety

Helen Toner's May 2025 essay explicitly applied Virginia Postrel's Future and Its Enemies framework to AI safety discourse, arguing that influential positions within the AI safety community were 'what Postrel would call stasist'—prioritizing control and stability over dynamism's freedom and exploration. Toner identified specific stasist assumptions: that fewer leading AI projects would be safer, that development should be concentrated in government-supervised labs, that nonproliferation (preventing spread of frontier capabilities) is the path to security. She argued these positions, however well-intentioned, produce stasist risks: concentration creates single points of failure, eliminates competitive pressure for safety innovation, and removes the distributed testing that reveals problems centralized plans miss. Her alternative was dynamist: open models enabling decentralized use, testing, and research; broad capability distribution under frameworks making failures informative; competitive pressure driving safety improvement. The essay became the most cited application of Postrel's political framework to AI governance, validating Postrel's 1998 prediction that her dynamist-stasist axis would structure technological debates more clearly than left-right ideology.