The Balance of AI Power: Anton Leicht on Politics, Pacing Deals, and Muddling Through Well

Nathan Labenz (0:00)

Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is Anton Leicht, fellow with the Technology and International Affairs program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and author of Threading the Needle, a wide-ranging sub-stack on the domestic and international political economy around AI progress. Where, over the last two years, Anton has performed something of an Alexander Hamilton, writing his way into the elite American AI conversation, despite being a recent and relatively young newcomer to the United States. This summer, I, like many others, have personally moved from worrying that AI could become scary, to feeling that today's AIs, with their rapidly advancing capabilities profiles, their newfound creativity and persistence in problem solving, and the many bad behaviors they've exhibited, even while knowing that they're being tested, are now legitimately scary.

Especially considering how often and how dramatically AIs are now surprising their creators, I don't think we should be too confident that anything in particular is still beyond their reach. That said, recognizing that we have a ton of work to do to understand and effectively control these systems doesn't make it easy to reach agreements that will actually give safety researchers the time they need to do so. And so, with that in mind, I was excited to get Anton's take on the power dynamics surrounding AI decision making. Including the relationships between the frontier companies and the independent non-profit auditing organizations, between the American frontier companies and the US government, between the US and its allies around the world, and of course between the United States and China.

We begin with a short conversation about how dangerous today's models really are. And while Anton is less worried than I am about the very short term, he agrees that the misalignment issues we're now seeing look sufficiently like the harder problems that he expects we'll face later, that a temporary scaling pause would indeed be valuable. From there, we go on to discuss the prospects that the US and China could collaborate to pace the frontier, and why he believes that in light of the many advantages that China has established in frontier technologies and manufacturing generally, he doubts that the US will want to do a deal that might erode its advantage in AI., even if such a deal would be good for the rest of the world.

We then assess what it would take for independent evaluation organizations like METER and Redwood to get more favorable working conditions from labs, a topic that has moved substantially in just the few days since we recorded, with both Anthropic and OpenAI committing to employee-like access for auditing organizations.

I also get his reaction to my idea, which also suddenly seems much more realistic, that the president of the United States could simply give top American companies a deadline by which they must agree on a framework for self-governance and peer-to-peer enforcement. Plus some other ideas for things the president could do unilaterally to improve the situation, such as clarifying the administration's stance on antitrust and export controls, as they pertain specifically to AI safety research collaborations.

After that, we get Anton's analysis of what the rest of the world should expect from the AI age. In short, he believes that most of the world will be quite disempowered, even as quality of life probably continues to improve. And while there's little that most countries can do about this, Europe in particular, he believes, given their economic scale and control of ASML and the broader semiconductor manufacturing tooling supply chain, should have enough power to reach a compute-for-access deal, whereby Europe allows American hyperscalers to build data centers in Europe in exchange for promises of continued access to frontier AI capabilities.

Beyond all of that, we talk about what other small countries have interesting strategies available, including Norway, the UAE, Singapore and Australia, how all of this analysis will begin to change as compute starts to move to space, whether or not Doomers can convert their predictions into winning trades in the financial market, how we should be thinking about minimizing concentration of power, and finally, why Anton's best-case scenario is not a grand utopian vision, but simply the hope that we might muddle through effectively enough to enjoy all of the obvious upside that AI has to offer.

Anton really impressed me with his depth of understanding and quality of analysis across a wide range of topics. So without further ado, I hope you enjoyed this conversation about the political economy and power dynamics of AI. With Anton Leicht, fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of the outstanding substack, Threading the Needle. The Cognitive Revolution is brought to you by Mercury, the fintech that more than 300,000 ambitious companies and individuals trust to run their finances. I've wired AI into nearly every corner of my life. My email, my messages, my calendar. I even gave Mercury virtual cards to my agents, with low limits and category and merchant restrictions, for their autonomous use. But still, my AI's access to my financial data has remained limited. With a normal bank, I might export a bunch of statements and have my assistant process them for me. But for real time, up-to-date information, and certainly for taking any action, trying to get your agent to use the bank via the browser is just too hard, too slow and too error prone to be worth it. And that's why Mercury's new conversational interface, Command, is such a big deal. It's built directly into Mercury, which means you get natural language access to your finances without exposing anything outside of your bank account. No exports, no spreadsheets, no pasting your transactions into third-party tools. I really think a lot of people are going to prefer it this way. And it can already help you take actions too, with everything bound by the permissions and approval policies that you've already set up in your account. I am genuinely impressed to see this level of AI integration in banking in 2026 And so, I invite you to join me in the future. Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA, members FDIC. Thank you to Mercury for supporting The Cognitive Revolution. And now, on with the show. Anton Leicht, fellow at The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.