Max Tegmark

As humanity gets closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a new geopolitical strategy is gaining traction in US and allied circles, in the NatSec, AI safety and tech communities. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and RAND Corporation call it the “entente”, while others privately refer to it as “hegemony" or “crush China”. I will argue that, irrespective of one's ethical or geopolitical preferences, it is fundamentally flawed and against US national security interests. If the US fights China in an AGI race, the only winners will be machines The entente strategy Amodei articulates key elements of this strategy as follows: "a coalition of democracies seeks to gain a clear advantage (even just a temporary one) on powerful AI by securing its supply chain, scaling quickly, and blocking or delaying adversaries’ access to key resources like chips and semiconductor equipment. This coalition would on one hand use AI to achieve robust military superiority (the stick) while at the same time offering to distribute the benefits of powerful AI (the carrot) to a wider and wider group of countries in exchange for supporting the coalition’s strategy to promote democracy (this would be a bit analogous to “Atoms for Peace”). The coalition would aim to gain the support of more and more of the world, isolating our worst adversaries and eventually putting them in a position where they are better off taking the same bargain as the rest of the world: give up competing with democracies in order to receive all the benefits and not fight a superior foe." […] This could optimistically lead to an 'eternal 1991'—a world where democracies have the upper hand and Fukuyama’s dreams are realized." Note the crucial point about “scaling quickly”, which is nerd-code for “racing to build AGI”. The question of whether this argument for "scaling quickly” is motivated by self-serving desires to avoid regulation deserves a separate analysis, and I will not further comment on it here except for noting