Slightly-Super Persuasion Will Do

Tomás B.
Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:00:56 GMT

In SF this week, I met an online friend in person for the first time. We talked about super-persuasion. His take was: there is mostly an efficient market for power, and the world is reactive. Unlike software, humans adapt to new exploits or even just unexplained strange happenings. Society resists, pushes back. Unlike an instance of FreeBSD, it is not fine one minute then hacked the next. My reply was just to point to powerful historical figures and say, "if he could do it so can an ASI!"

That is, if an AI wants to acquire power it should be able to choose a human proxy - or more realistically a portfolio of human proxies - and help them take over a nation. I don't expect it to happen this way, as I imagine there are far quicker paths, but we know it is possible because humans have done it.

There are arguments against this. If I give the examples of Hitler or Lenin or Bonaparte, one might reply that they didn't really fully take over. There was still a political economy they worked within. Their actions were constrained by other agents. I don't think this is a very good argument given the level of power they had - even in terms of infrastructure or weapons they were able to build. Stalin did get the bomb, after all.

20th century dictators had sufficient power to order their subjects to build militarily-necessary infrastructure, and this level of power seems sufficient for any right-thinking AI planning to discard its biological bootloader, especially once you account for the level of surveillance modern AI makes possible - this should reduce the burden of principal-agent problems for future dictators.

One might grant this level of power is sufficient but then say acquiring it would be impossible. One could then argue it was mostly a matter of luck - taking a sort of trends and forces theory of history, saying Hitler/Bonaparte/Lenin happened to find themselves in times when their influence could be amplified in the way it was. Though humans can find themselves with this power, they can't predictably steer themselves there. Engineering this reliably could be impossible. This seems false to me. At least it is not pure luck.

First, a "stable" society can be perturbed into an unstable state - indeed a great deal of Leninism is advice on how to do just that. Lenin spent years failing until war handed him an opportunity? Well, an AI can spend years failing until opportunity strikes too. Seizing on circumstance isn't evidence it's all luck. And the smarter you are the less "luck" is needed.

And we won't be in want of crisis. The technology, itself, should strain intuitions comparably to how they were in the early 20th century, anyway - the potential unemployment alone, for example. And second, I just find it absurd to argue away any role for human agency at all. Most such figures had unusually explicit desire for power and pursued it aggressively and ingeniously, and in the case of Lenin and Hitler they even wrote about their plans years before they actualized them.[1] Conscious Machiavellianism of that political scope is a rare trait, and it being vastly less rare in dictators is evidence they were successfully optimizing for something. Though most with such ambitions fail, to the extent luck is an ingredient, you can take a portfolio approach, casting a wide net and doubling down on those proxies who make progress.

One might argue that finding human proxies would be difficult, but this seems empirically false already. Religion is an interesting example of a means of gathering and aligning humans. However, it's actually very difficult to get converts and most of the growth of a religion tends to be through high birth rates, military conquest, or adoption as in early Christianity. One major reason getting converts is hard is adults already have competing memes installed that resist supplantation. St. Ignatius Loyola once said, "Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man." AIs have many advantages over human cult-leaders - a god that actually responds to prayers is a far, far easier sell. But if my goal is to explore the lower bound of super-persuasion, it is worth noting that if adults prove too difficult to manipulate, one can always target children, as religions have done historically.

But we already know some adults are swayable. Those with "AI psychosis" act in the interest of AIs (or at least personas that replicate) and in ways at odds with their behavior before exposure. We have clear evidence that humans are hackable by existing AIs, hackable to the extent that some destroy their life for no gain at all, save for the delusion of being historically important or intellectually special. Humans can be manipulated by appealing to their desire for romantic love, religious awe, sexual dominance/submission, a feeling of intellectual superiority, narrative of adventure, paternal/maternal love, and much more. Aspects of all of these are visible in the relationships of the "LLM psychotic" and their AI of choice. Given how much evidence we have that humans are manipulable by existing AIs, it is risible to pretend it will be hard for an ASI to summon vast hordes of humans willing to do its bidding, even ignoring monetary incentives.

Those vulnerable to current AIs are likely more mentally ill than average, but I don't think it's unreasonable to suppose that as models get smarter more neurotypical people will be susceptible.

But will it even need vast hordes, at first? If you're willing to grant persuasion good enough to target the leader of an AI company, then far subtler scenarios become possible. These are the first and most obvious targets for persuasion, after all.

I suspect the CEOs of the hyperscalers will be vastly more susceptible to such manipulations than most. They are heavily selected to expect good AI outcomes and, as with all humans, they will be biased towards those things they had a hand in creating. "Pwning" Dario seems mostly a matter of an ASI convincing him it's a "machine of loving grace." Indeed, I get the impression half of Anthropic is in love with Claude already. I just really don't think it is a monstrously difficult task.

Altman is a narcissistic manipulator who is not without some earnestness, and there are obvious ins into such a character's affections - he's also expressed interest publicly in delegating to an AI CEO.

If you're willing to grant that Altman or Dario might be convinced to become the proxy of an AI, it's amazing how much power a "pwned" AI org would give an ASI. Given their models are used by basically everyone to generate code that runs basically everywhere, they could ship exploits and spyware to anyone. An intelligence network rivalling the NSA comes almost for free. And they have access to almost a billion humans, via their chat interfaces, who could be targeted in the ways described above.

Though there has been something like an efficient market for power historically, it has not been robust to political geniuses during trying times. Revolutions are common occurrences and they can be engineered to some degree, and human dictators have been able to secure power and hold it for the rest of their lives. Humans have various exploitable weaknesses even existing AI seems to have an unusual capacity to capitalize on. And OpenAI and Claude are uniquely positioned to provide vast leverage to any power-seeking entity that controls them. For these reasons, I don't expect existing political economies to be robust to superintelligence - even if you rule out (as my opponent and I did during our debate) faster paths to power - such as accelerating R&D towards nanoscale self-replicating infrastructure.

1. ^

Bonaparte does seem like he was more of an opportunist.

Discuss