Securing Superintelligence: National Security, Espionage & AI Control with Jeremie & Edouard Harris

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guests are Jeremie and Edouard Harris, founders of Gladstone AI and authors of the sobering new report, America's Superintelligence Project. Many listeners will recognize Jeremie from the Last Week in AI podcast, a show that I've repeatedly recommended and continue to listen to regularly myself, as Jeremie and his co-host Andre do any consistently excellent job of getting into real and often quite technical depth on the most important stories in AI, with Jeremie in particular presenting a very sophisticated and nuanced perspective that balances genuine enthusiasm for AI upside with sincere concern about loss of control and other existential risks. Today's conversation offers a more zoomed out perspective on what is arguably the core dilemma of our time. Racing ahead with AI development to stay ahead of China increases the risk of loss of control and other catastrophic accidents. But at the same time, insisting on adequate safety standards and allowing time for safety research to develop potentially seeds technological superiority to a rival nation that we can't currently trust. This problem, which they describe as over-constrained and admirably face head on without flinching, creates profound challenges for US policymakers, especially as AI capabilities continue to advance rapidly toward potentially superhuman levels, as U.S.-China tension continues to escalate, and as the national security establishment begins to consider a Manhattan Project style effort intended not just to maintain technological superiority, but perhaps even to achieve enduring strategic dominance.
Rather than taking a side in the debate regarding whether such a project is wise in the first place, Jeremie and Ed set out to understand what would actually be required to achieve the level of security needed to protect both the infrastructure and the secrets of such a project from our national adversaries. They do this not just by reading and theorizing, but by spending time on location at data centers and elsewhere with seasoned intelligence officials, special operators, and other technical experts. The resulting report forces us to confront the gritty realities of security, espionage, and geopolitical hardball that absolutely must be factored in to any serious discussion about the future of advanced AI. Drawing on their unique access, Jeremie and Ed paint a picture of a US critical infrastructure stack from the electrical grid to the data centers to the highly international research teams that is far more vulnerable to disruption and espionage than most realize. And they argue that while perfect security is practically impossible, an acceptable level of security for such a sensitive project requires a deterrent strategy that both raises the cost and observability of adversarial action and credibly threatens controlled but meaningful retaliation. While some will no doubt read this as a blueprint for victory in the AI race, others, myself included, read it as more of a warning. The sheer number of vulnerabilities we'd need to patch to effectively prevent China or other sophisticated actors from stealing our AI secrets, the compromises to core American values this would require to operationalize, and the risks from the centralization of power that all this would presumably entail, are for me reason enough to steer away from such a national project and instead try whatever measures we can, however unlikely they may be to succeed, to create both the technology foundations and the geopolitical conditions necessary to begin to rebuild trust with China and the international community at large, such that humanity can work together, both to safely develop advanced AI systems and to manage the societal transitions that are likely to result from their deployment. Is that naïve on my part? Maybe. But hopefully after listening to this conversation, you'll agree that it's not uninformed or close-minded. I am very much open to changing my mind. But for now, with the latest generation of intensively RL-trained models showing so many of the bad behaviors that AI safety theorists have long warned about, and with no particularly low-risk plan available anywhere, I continue to remind myself that we have far more in common with the Chinese than we do with the AIs. And I personally would choose to bet on our ability to find common ground with our fellow humans if it proves truly necessary, over our ability to not only control, but effectively steer the future with hastily built superintelligence.
As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to share it with friends. Or read a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just leave us a comment on YouTube. Remember too that I'll be speaking at three major AI events over the next few months. May 28th through 30th at Imagine AI Live in Las Vegas, August 12th and 13th at the Adapta Summit in São Paulo, Brazil, and September 23rd through 25th at the Enterprise Tech Leadership Summit, again in Las Vegas. If you'll be attending any of these, I would be happy to meet in person. And if you're a business leader who's working on AI automations, application development, agent design, or high-level AI strategy, I also invite you to get in touch. I'm currently advising three companies for just a few hours per month each, and I have found it both very fun and highly educational to help companies strengthen and confidently accelerate their AI initiatives. For any of these reasons or just to give us some feedback on the podcast, you're always welcome to reach out via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network. With that, I hope you enjoy and take some time to properly consider the implications of this critical examination of America's vexing superintelligence dilemma with Jeremy and Edouard Harris of Gladstone AI. Jeremy and Edouard Harris, founders of Gladstone AI and authors of the new report, America's Superintelligence Project, welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.