Tristan Harris

In order for adversaries like the United States and China to agree on reasonable red lines or on things like bioweapons, cyber hacking, or the risk of recursive self-improvement, they first need to be able to trust each other.

And so we urgently need to build the verification technology that would make that trust possible.

So today, I'm so excited to have on the show two experts in this area to talk about the kinds of verification technology we need to think about how we would do this for AI.

Tim Fist is the Director of Emerging Technology Policy at the Institute for Progress, and Janet Egan is a Senior Fellow and Deputy Director for the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for New American Security, or CNAS.

Tim and Janet, welcome to Your Unabided Attention.

Thanks for having me.

So just to level set for listeners who really don't know that much, just for a regular person out there, why does coordination on AI matter?

Like what would happen if we didn't have coordination?

Do you want to add to that, Tim, in terms of how the consequences of AI are global and not contained to one country?

Right.

So just to back up for listeners, because Anthropic recently did publish this letter about a need for a global slowdown.

But they noted that if one lab chooses to slow down, and that doesn't stop China from slowing down, then they're just basically sacrificing the current lead that they have.

And you're back to the basic fundamental arms race that, you know, everyone is racing to build more and more powerful models.

for the fear that if you have a more powerful one and you can use it over me, aka China gets mythos and can hack the US before US gets mythos and can hack China, just that paranoia alone creates the kind of pressures for continuing to advance on the capability curve.

But we get back to how could these labs and countries and companies actually verify that they're doing the right thing and they're going to uphold their agreement?

Because we all know they're going to say, oh, I'm going to do the right thing, but then secretly I'm going to build it in a black project in an underground bunker facility.

you know, military base or, you know, data center that's buried underneath the earth.

And so that brings us to the conversation we're having today.

How would you make this relatable to someone who doesn't understand or think about, you know, verifying AI treaties?

What's the story of mystery we might point to?