Washington Hones in on AI Safety, What Are AI Doomers Proposing | Diet TBPN

**John Coogan** (0:02)
What are the AI Doomers actually proposing? That's the question I was trying to answer this morning.
For a while-

**Jordi Hays** (0:09)
20-year sentences.

**John Coogan** (0:11)
That's one, AI 2027 predicted that this month, late in 2026, Congress would wake up, and that is in the journal. Congress is suddenly waking up to the AI doomsday threat. And so this is happening all over the place. Was it Matt Damon who was caught on TMZ being interrogated about his thoughts on AI risk? There's now protests. I believe AI 2027 predicts a 10,000 person anti-AI protest by the end of the year. I was trying to figure out how big this protest in Chapel Hill, North Carolina earlier this month was. I think it came in sub 10K, but certainly tracking to it.
It was about 150 people at this protest in Chapel Hill, but just two ooms away from the prediction from AI 2027 I wanted to dig into what the actual proposal is, because the joke for a while has been just like everyone, when they're pressed on this, they just say, we got to talk about it. We got to talk about this. The actual proposal is super concrete in AI 2040, and it's very interesting just to hear about how they want to slow things down. The thing that I think a lot of people online who are like, yay, an anti-AI sentiment that's going viral are going to be depressed about is that, this is not stop AI at all. AI 2040 is like keep the inference flow in, the current models are great.
Also, let's keep doing capabilities research, but we just want to reach super intelligence by 2040 instead of 2028 where we're not necessarily prepared. They want it to be highly controlled by governments, nations, states, highly secured, and there's a whole bunch of very, very tactical recommendations that they make around that. The first mechanism is an AI pause. They want to pause training. They don't want to do any more new frontier training runs or R&D experiments.
To enforce this, they're calling to apply inference-only verification to essentially all major AI data centers. So anyone who has more than 10,000 H100 equivalents, roughly $100 million of equipment, and that is pretty easy to figure out. You're just like, big building over there. Let's send the inspector inside. Oh, says NVIDIA on all these chips. Count them up. There's over 10,000 of them. You got to apply for this permit. You got to tell us what you're doing. Very easy to enforce, at least in the United States. And with an international body, you could do the same thing internationally. So, the whole goal, you can only inference the current models, and you got to verify your workloads. With an independent auditor, probably the government. Maybe there's some sort of non-governmental organization that's doing this.
You know, there's a whole bunch of different solutions that you can pull from across nuclear non-proliferation work that's happened in the past. Major countries, they want them to declare AI compute inventories. Tell everyone, not just your local population, but also the international community, how many warheads you got? How many H100 equivalents do you have? Where are they?
Everyone shares this. That's going to be a really tough cell because international agreements are really, really tough cells. It's much easier to have a groundswell of support for something that happens in America. America changes. We have a system that we don't really have the international rules to quickly implement that in a way that doesn't allow for a lot of defect. They want to physically remove high-bandwidth east-west networking inside of data centers so you can't do large distributed training runs, but you can still do inference. For any new AI R&D data centers, they want entirely new facilities built from scratch with nation-state level physical security and verification. But for the next run and the one after that and the one after that, as it gets crazier, we want it in a new building built inside a Faraday cage so you can't communicate it from the outside. We want a bunch of physical controls. It's like going to a nuclear facility, highly verified who gets in the building and when, air gap communications.
This is one interesting proposal that they have that really shows how deep they thought this through. They want the R&D data center to be connected externally. If you want to communicate with it and you want to tell it what to do, okay, train the next running or do whatever, they will have a bandwidth capped connection at one meg per second. So you can send little instructions, but if you say, send me the weights because I'm taking them somewhere else, it would take you like five years to exfiltrate it. So interesting like hardware solution to this.