A COLD WAR MODEL FOR AI

The unveiling of DeepSeek R1, China's most advanced AI model to date, signals a dangerous inflection point in the global AI race. As President Donald Trump warned in response, this development represents a wake-up call for American leadership. What's at stake isn't merely economic competitiveness but also the most geopolitically precarious technology since the nuclear age.

- DAN HENDRYCKS AND ERIC SCHMIDT

After the creation of the atomic bomb, America’s technological monopoly lasted only four years before Soviet scientists achieved parity. This balance of terror, combined with the unprecedented destructive potential of these new weapons, gave rise to mutual assured destruction (MAD)—a deterrence framework that, despite its flaws, prevented catastrophic conflict for decades.

Today’s AI competition has the potential to be even more complex, in part because AI touches nearly everything from medicine to finance to defense. Powerful AI may even automate AI research itself: recursively improving AI enhances its abilities without prompting from humans. A nation on the cusp of wielding superintelligent AI, an AI vastly smarter than humans in virtually every domain, would amount to a national-security emergency for its rivals, who might turn to threatening sabotage rather than cede power. If we are heading toward a world with superintelligence, we must be clear-eyed about the potential for geopolitical instability.

Let us imagine how the U.S. might reasonably respond to rival states seeking an insurmountable AI advantage. Suppose Beijing established a lead over American AI labs and reached the cusp of recursively improving superintelligence before us. Regardless of whether Beijing could maintain control over what it was building, U.S. national security would be existentially threatened.

Rationally, we may resort to threatening sabotage in the form of cyberattacks against AI data centers in China. We might similarly expect Xi Jinping—or Vladimir Putin, who has little chance of obtaining the technology first—to respond in a similar fashion if we approach recursively improving superintelligence. They would not stand idly by if a U.S. monopoly on power were imminent.