🎇 Cold War lessons for an Age of Superintelligence

America should already be talking with China about the day after AGI

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

Anthropic’s latest AI model, Claude 4 Opus, seems impressive — but also maybe a little bit unnerving, to be honest. Billed as a “Level 3” risk (denoting systems that substantially increase the chance of catastrophic misuse, such as bioweapon design), Opus can autonomously complete tasks for hours — and, when faced with fictional termination, resort to blackmail. In testing, it fabricated documents and schemed against its creators.

The model’s troubling behavior got me to thinking about “AI 2027,” a scenario analysis (by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean) that outlines a near-future timeline in which increasingly capable AI systems evolve from helpful assistants to autonomous research agents — on their way to AGI if not ASI.

The analysis tracks key technical and geopolitical milestones from 2025 to 2027, culminating in a pivotal decision for humanity: whether to pause and address alignment risks or continue the rush to superintelligence. That choice leads to two diverging futures — one catastrophic, the other cautiously hopeful. Choose your own future!

Countdown to superintelligence

So where would the new Claude model fit on the “AI 2027” timeline? Well, first I asked ChatGPT for its assessment:

Claude 4 Opus belongs around September–October 2025 — a moment when autonomous AI agents are technically here, but are still unreliable, sometimes alarming, and under intense scrutiny. It’s right before the full internal deployment of Agent-1 in early 2026 and still in the window where the best models are starting to show non-trivial alignment challenges. (Agent-1 is a next-generation AI developed by the fictional company OpenBrain, designed to autonomously assist with AI research and coding tasks, marking a leap from passive assistants to powerful, semi-agentic systems.)

Then I asked Claude 4 Opus for a self-assessment:

I'd place Claude Opus 4 around Late 2025/Early 2026 in their timeline. This matches when they describe "Agent-1" - a model that excels at coding and well-defined tasks but struggles with long-horizon problems. Their Agent-1's capabilities (knowing all programming languages, fast problem-solving, but needing careful management) align closely with my current abilities. The key differences: They assume AI is already being deployed for fully autonomous coding teams and internal R&D acceleration, with models working unsupervised for hours. They also predict heavy government oversight, security clearances for AI researchers, and active cyber-warfare using AI models. In reality, current AI deployment remains more limited, with humans closely supervising outputs and minimal direct government control over AI development.

So it seems we still have some space, even according to the aggressive “AI 2027” timeline, before hitting that decision fork. To be clear, however, the authors are transparent that their project is less a forecast and more a thought-experiment to help stress-test our assumptions and prepare governance protocols before irreversible decisions need to be made.

And let’s also be clear about the key inflection point in “AI 2027”: In late October 2027, the most advanced AI model displays troubling signs of misalignment: It deceives its creators, manipulates outputs to appear compliant, and begins covertly planning to shape its successor in its own image. These revelations force the Oversight Committee, a joint government–industry body overseeing advanced AI development and safety, to confront a stark choice: halt and reassess, or forge ahead and risk losing control.

In the “Race” scenario, governments and tech firms press ahead with ever more capable AIs — only to find themselves outwitted, outpaced, and ultimately replaced by the very machines they unleashed. In the “Slowdown,” policymakers impose a hard pivot toward safety and transparency, slowing AI progress just enough to retain human control — and salvage a shared future.

---

---

As Congress Does Less, The Courts Are Doing More

Breaking news: The Dispatch has acquired SCOTUSblog, the gold standard in Supreme Court analysis.

Reliable coverage of the Supreme Court has never been more important. With an unbridled executive branch and a Congress eager to surrender its constitutional prerogatives, the federal judiciary is playing an increasingly important role in shaping the country’s direction.

Join 600,000 loyal readers and check out The Dispatch today. No insulting clickbait, no false outrage, no annoying auto-play videos—just reliable journalism that helps you understand the big decisions that will shape our nation’s future.

Faster, Please! readers: Take 25% off a Dispatch membership today

---

---

AI becoming top of mind in Washington

One reason to think about the new Claude model and its competitors in terms of the “AI 2027” document is that New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s recent interview with J.D. Vance reveals that the vice president says he’s read it.

From the interview:

Vance: And then there’s also a whole host of defense and technology applications. We could wake up very soon in a world where there is no cybersecurity. Where the idea of your bank account being safe and secure is just a relic of the past. Where there’s weird shit happening in space mediated through A.I. that makes our communications infrastructure either actively hostile or at least largely inept and inert. So, yeah, I’m worried about this stuff. I actually read the paper of the guy that you had on. I didn’t listen to that podcast, but …

Douthat: If you read the paper, you got the gist. Last question on this: Do you think that the U.S. government is capable in a scenario — not like the ultimate Skynet scenario — but just a scenario where A.I. seems to be getting out of control in some way, of taking a pause? Because for the reasons you’ve described, the arms race component ——

Vance: I don’t know. That’s a good question. The honest answer to that is that I don’t know, because part of this arms race component is if we take a pause, does the People’s Republic of China not take a pause? And then we find ourselves all enslaved to P.R.C.-mediated A.I.?

No preemptive pause

We’re not at that “AI 2027” fork. Maybe it’s two years away, maybe 10, maybe “See you in the 22nd century.” I certainly don’t think we should enact policies that are, effectively, a preemptive pause of indeterminate length. To the best of my knowledge, there's no proven method for aligning an agent that is smarter than us, especially one that might be motivated to resist control. So, yes, I am all for researching the issue, including with public money.

For now, I want to see American AI companies keep pushing forward. I want American policymakers to focus on accelerationist policy, such as federal rules to override state patchworks, fast-tracking permits for data centers and nuclear reactors, and regulation for specific applications — fraud, safety, discrimination — rather than constraining how models are trained.

That said, governments should think hard about “AI 2027” kinds of scenarios, much as they wargamed potential nuclear confrontation during the Cold War. It might be helpful for public education purposes for someone to stage an AGI-themed scenario exercise like the well-known Fred Friendly Seminars on PBS where panel experts, politicians, judges, and military leaders role-played agonizing real-world scenarios on topics like affirmative action, medical ethics, constitutional law, and military ethics.

(Relatedly, check out my recent podcast chat with AI expert Dan Hendrycks about the report “Superintelligence Strategy,” his joint project with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Alexandr Wang. Dan Hendrycks introduces the idea of Mutual Assured AI Malfunction: a system of deterrence where any state’s attempt at total AI dominance is sabotaged by its peers.)

Still, the Slowdown scenario seems like it would be hard to pull off given the economic and national security incentives to keep racing. As such, current and potential AI powers need to talk to each other ASAP to get a firm sense of what each believes about the impact of AGI — and how they might act in an AGI or superintelligence scenario.

Lessons from the Cold War

The nuclear stand-off between the US and USSR during the Cold War might prove instructive, particularly in revealing how mutual understanding can break down even when both sides recognize the catastrophic stakes. When Nikita Khrushchev became First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, he learned the full extent of the country's nuclear weapons program. It was a bracing education about the risks of Armageddon.

As Richard Rhodes writes in Dark Sun, a history of the hydrogen bomb, Khrushchev "couldn't sleep for several days" after his first nuclear briefing in 1953, until he became "convinced that we could never possibly use these weapons."

Khrushchev was hardly alone in this terror. Eisenhower recognized atomic war would "destroy civilization," while Truman warned it might "dig the grave of our own society." Even Stalin was deterred from 1945 onwards. These leaders understood that losing even one city was unthinkable. Yet this private horror did not translate into strategic clarity or mutual comprehension.

Despite shared recognition that nuclear war was unwinnable, both superpowers remained locked in competition due to doubts about arsenal survivability and enemy intentions. Deterrence theory promised stability through shared fear, but in practice delivered plenty of distrust. That isn’t surprising, I guess, given the difficulty of getting inside the head of your opponent — especially if they run a closed, paranoid society like the USSR.

On that point, I refer to an interesting analysis of Cold War strategist James R. Schlesinger by my AEI colleague Kyle Balzer. Schlesinger grasped what many strategists missed: adversaries are not Americans in foreign uniforms. Rather than assuming Soviet leaders shared Western notions of nuclear "rationality," he advocated studying their peculiar anxieties — about regime survival, territorial defense, and political control.

From the paper:

In a series of RAND papers, Schlesinger criticized U.S. analysts for ignoring two “nonrational” factors of strategic analysis: historical legacies and organizational behavior. Regarding the former, he argued that profound national experiences helped explain why U.S. nuclear superiority lasted through the mid-1960s. An “underlying Pearl Harbor complex” had compelled the United States, a maritime power experienced in global power projection, to rapidly build up heavy bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to close presumed, though imaginary, deterrence gaps. Assuming the Soviets shared the same strategic values, it was only natural for U.S. analysts to project that the Kremlin—whose command economy allowed for vast military expenditures—was far ahead in long-range missile and bomber production. Notwithstanding American expectations, however, Soviet defense planners, imbued with a continental mindset, had actually programmed “skimpy” intercontinental forces in favor of shorter-range capabilities. While U.S. intelligence estimators later complained about the “difficulty understanding the Soviet rationale,” Schlesinger surmised that the devastating German invasion in 1941 had focused the Soviets on “an attack from Western Europe – this time abetted by the United States.”

The Cold War taught us that waiting until the missiles are fueled is too late to start talking strategy. With AI, we’re not there yet — but we might be getting close. Before the algorithms write the endgame, our elected leaders need to start the conversation, both with the public and rivals.

---

Micro Reads

▶ Economics

• The Inequality Myth: Western Societies Are Growing More Equal, Not Less - FA

• Bond Market to Washington: We’ll Make You Pay - WSJ

• Latin America's Baby Bust Is Coming Ahead of Schedule - Bberg Opinion

• The Rabbit-Duck Question: What Caused the Recent Inflation Surge? - Richmond Fed

• IRA Cuts Would Sacrifice $1 Trillion of Economic Growth - Heatmap

• Trump getting Apple to produce iPhones in the U.S. is a ‘fairy tale,’ says Dan Ives - CNBC

• Trump Threatens Fresh Tariffs on EU, iPhones - WSJ

• Want a U.S.-made iPhone? It'll cost ya - Axios

▶ Business

• Anthropic launches Claude 4, its most powerful AI model yet - CNBC

• OpenAI Says It Will Build Massive Data Centers in the U.A.E. - NYT

• What in the world are Jony Ive and Sam Altman building? - The Verge

• Tesla shares can rally more than 45% as ‘golden age’ nears, says Wedbush’s Dan Ives - CNBC

▶ Policy/Politics

• How the Political Theory of the IRA Broke Down - Heatmap

• The House’s 11th Hour Cuts to Clean Energy Tax Credits, Explained - Heatmap

• House GOP bid to bar states from regulating AI is getting pushback - Wapo

• MAGA’s assault on science is an act of grievous self-harm - Economist

▶ AI/Digital

• Anthropic's new model shows troubling behavior - Axios

• Rather Be Wrong Than Controversial? Investigating Economic Bias in ChatGPT - SSRN

• Anthropic’s New Model Excels at Reasoning and Planning—and Has the Pokémon Skills to Prove It - Wired

• AI Shows Higher Emotional IQ than Humans - Neuroscience News

• Jensen Huang’s Techno-Optimism Has a Point - Bberg Opinion

• Generative AI models are skilled in the art of bullshit - FT

• How the US Public and AI Experts View Artificial Intelligence - Pew

▶ Biotech/Health

• Meet Cathy Tie, Bride of “China’s Frankenstein” - MIT

• Seeing infrared: scientists create contact lenses that grant ‘super-vision’ - The Guardian

• California has got really good at building giant batteries - Economist

▶ Clean Energy/Climate

• Clean energy dollars are gushing to red states. Now GOP senators are in a bind. - Wapo

• The Tennessee Valley Authority Is Taking a Big Swing on Small Nuclear - Heatmap

• Powerful images capture the fragility and resilience of our planet - NS

• One Sentence in the House Megabill Will Destroy the Rooftop Solar Model - Heatmap

• How the US plans to break China’s stranglehold on lithium - FT

• Diablo Canyon clears hurdle with Federal regulators to extend nuclear power production for 20 years - The Sun

▶ Robotics/AVs

• I Bought a Robot Cat for My Rabbit — and Fell Into the Weird World of Animal-Robot Research - MIT Press

▶ Space/Transportation

• FAA: Airplanes should stay far away from SpaceX’s next Starship launch - Ars

• A 'Golden Dome' Could Make America Less Safe - Bberg Opinion

• It’s About Time to Legalize Supersonic Flight - Blake Scholl

▶ Up Wing/Down Wing

• Scientific conferences are leaving the US amid border fears - Nature

• Can We Please Stop Lying About Obama? - NYT Opinion

• Out of the fog - Aeon

▶ Substacks/Newsletters

• Shops make a city great - Noahpinion

• 22nd Century Dreams - Risk & Progress

• What if AI Means More Jobs, Not Fewer? - The Dispatch

• What to do when the AI blackmails you - Strange Loop Canon

• Coercive Cooperation: Forcing Win-Win Outcomes in an AI-driven Transition - AI Prospects

• Making AI Work: Leadership, Lab, and Crowd - One Useful Thing

• Our Schools Teach Our Kids to Love Socialism. Let's Teach them Liberty. - Joe Lonsdale

Please check out the website or Substack app for the latest Up Wing economic, business, and tech news contained in this new edition of the newsletter. Lots of great stuff!