I am somewhat reluctant to engage deeply on the specific counterfactual here. Disagreeing with some of the more absurd statements by AndrewHickey has already placed me in the position of delivering enemy soldiers. That is an undesirable position to be in when the subject is one that encourages people to turn off their brains and start thinking with their emotional reflexes. Disagreeing with terrible arguments is not the same as supporting the opposition - but you an still expect the same treatment!

I would have to engage rather a lot of creative thinking to construct a scenario where I would personally take any drastic measures. Apart from the ethical injunctions I've previously mentioned I don't consider myself qualified to make the decision. The most I would do is make sure the situation has been brought to the attention of the relevant spooks and make sure competent AI researchers are informed so that they can give any necessary advice to the spook-analysts. Even then the spook agency would probably not need to resort to violence. If they do, in fact, have to resort to violence because the AGI creators force the issue then the creators in question definitely cannot be trusted!

If you think that a person is about to turn on a (to your way of thinking) insufficiently Friendly AI, such that killing them might stop the inevitable paperclipping of all you hold dear, how do you take into account the fact that they might have outwitted you by setting up a dead man's switch?

Now, with the aforementioned caveats, let us begin. I shall first note then assume away all the options that are available for circumventing dead man's switches. I refer here to resources the CIA could get their hands on. That means bunker buster bombs and teams of top of the line hackers to track down online instances. But those measures are not completely reliable so I'll take it for granted that the DMS works.

We now have a situation where terrorists are holding the world hostage. Ineffectively. Either they'll destroy the world or, if you kill them, they'll destroy the world. So it doesn't matter too much what you - you're dead either way. It seems the appropriate response is to blow the terrorists up. I'm not sure if I always advocate "don't negotiate with terrorists" but I definitely advocate "don't negotiate with terrorists when they are going to do the worst case thing anyway"!

But that is still too easy. Let's go to the next case. We'll say that the current design has a 99.9% chance of producing an uFAI. But if we give the AI creators another month to finish their work their creation has a 1% chance of creating an FAI[1]. Now the DMS threat actually matters. There is something to lose. The question becomes how do you deal with terrorists in a once-off, all-in situation. What do you do when (a small percentage but all that is available of) everything is at stake and someone can present a credible threat?

I actually don't know the answer. I am not sure there is a well established. Being the kind of group that doesn't take the terrorists out with a missile barrage has all sorts of problems. But being the person who does blow them away has a rather obvious problem too. I recall Vladimir making a interesting post regarding blackmail and terrorism however I don't think it gave us a how to guide kind of resolution.

[1] Also assume that you expect another source to create an FAI with 50% chance a few years later if the current creators are stopped.