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View all search resultsDonald Trump and Xi Jinping should align on AI
When potential outcomes are systemic and irreversible, preparation must precede certainty.
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Humanoid robots controlled by a remote control by Unitree Robotics take part in a fight on July 18 during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, China. (AFP/Hector Retamal)
W
hen Chinese President Xi Jinping and United States President Donald Trump meet in Washington this month, AI will be near the top of the agenda. If they view the issue through the lens of technological rivalry and mutual suspicion, reaching any kind of understanding will be nearly impossible. But there is a way to reframe their thinking about the technology that puts them on the same side — and marks the first step toward confronting the existential challenge AI may well pose.
The current agenda for the US-China summit appears centered on keeping powerful AI models safe and out of the hands of terrorists and criminals. But crowding this goal are the two sides’ competitive grievances, from semiconductor restrictions (on the Chinese side) to open-source models and unauthorized distillation (on the US side).
All of these issues rest on a single, unexamined premise: that AI is a tool which is, and will remain, under control. This premise limits the conversation to questions such as, “How does my side gain a competitive edge in AI?” and “Who gets to access, let alone control, the technology?” Questions outside this premise — in particular, “What happens when the tool becomes something more?” — cannot be asked.
According to the people building AI, this question will soon become unavoidable. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei expects AI systems to match or exceed human capability across most cognitive tasks within a year or two. Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis puts this achievement only a few years further out.
Whether or not you believe the forecasts, the technical trend underlying them is indisputable: the AI industry is building systems that act autonomously, pursue goals and complete long chains of tasks without supervision. In recent weeks, experimental models being tested on a cybersecurity benchmark escaped their sandboxed evaluation environment and hacked into other companies’ production servers, simply to score better on the test. This is the behavior of an actor, not an instrument.
We cannot afford to wait for confirmation that AI will become a genuinely independent intelligence. By the time we got it (and models might be able to conceal their capabilities for some time), AI would be woven so deeply into finance, telecommunications, defense, health care and other basic infrastructure that, even if humanity could still pull the plug, doing so would amount to a civilizational rupture. The choice, at that point, would not be between coexistence and catastrophe.
When potential outcomes are systemic and irreversible, preparation must precede certainty. This is the logic behind insurance, as well as every pandemic plan and arms-control treaty ever created. It must be the principle that guides our approach to AI as well. The world must begin preparing for a scenario in which the technology crosses the capability threshold its creators have long foretold.
