Slowing American AI development sounds straightforward, but doing so without ceding advantage to China creates a strategic and verification problem that limits what Washington can realistically do.
The AI race resembles a prisoner’s dilemma: each side has an incentive to keep developing unless both can trust and verify a slowdown.
Verifying a slowdown is harder than for nuclear arms because AI infrastructure—data centers, software, and compute—can be hidden in ordinary facilities.
U.S. policymaking is fragmented: AI spans multiple committees and priorities, and lawmakers disagree on whether regulation will protect safety or hand an edge to rivals.
Other leading figures in AI have voiced support for putting more safeguards around the race toward superintelligence. So you might expect Washington to be scrambling to figure out what to do about it. Doing it without handing our AI advantage to China could be one of the toughest problems Washington has ever faced.
The problem is that neither can completely trust the other to keep its promise. The problem is that when both countries make that decision, neither gets the safer outcome. government hasn't completely ignored the risks of artificial intelligence.
You see, slowing down AI might sound simple in theory. Under the program, AI companies can voluntarily give the federal government access to certain powerful models for up to 30 days before releasing them more widely. The order specifically says it doesn't create a mandatory licensing or approval process for new AI models.
While pacing AI development might sound like a quick fix, it is far from an easy solution.
Remember when tech leaders would tell their employees to “move fast and break things”? It seemed that would be the way of AI too. But after a summer where rogue AI agents became reality, and researchers warned that AI could kill us all, a number of leading US AI companies are publicly suggesting it’s time […]
Slowing down sounds simple. Until there’s a rival ahead.
AI’s biggest labs are suddenly calling for a slower pace of development. Is it because AI risks are catching up with the technology, or because the economics of the race are getting harder to justify?
Anthopic's CEO now believes the AI industry needs to slow its pace of development. Ian unpacks two disturbing developments that led to this.
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