What Safeguarding Nukes Can Teach Us About Safeguarding A.I.
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What is the context of the Trump‑Xi meeting and why is AI on the agenda?
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From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bavara. This is the daily. Last night in a lavish ceremony. President Trump welcomed Chinese leader Xi Jinping as he arrived in the United States for two days of closely watched negotiations. On their crowded agenda. What if any role they should play in regulating artificial intelligence amid a global freakout over its risks? Today. As my colleague David Sanger explains, when it comes to protecting humanity from technological catastrophe, there's really only one proven model for the two leaders to look to. It's Thursday, September twenty-fourth. David? Up from Washington. DC sitting here in our New York studios and I didn't even have to come
to you this time. You know I just had to come see the Dailies Empire in New York. In person. In person. Yeah.
It's
pretty
a humble empire. It's a late stage. Uh so David, when President Trump and the leader of China, Xi Jinping, meet in Washington today. They're gonna broach this subject on many people's minds, which is the risk of artificial intelligence. That risk, including, of course, these swarming rogue AI agents that have been hacking into companies and basically breaking the rules of their creators. And what she and Trump uniquely can maybe do about it is gonna be the subject of at least some of this meeting. And I think we've all come to understand that the leaders of the US and China are uniquely positioned to talk about the safety of AI because they're the countries with the most advanced frontier AI laboratories.
And the only way that AI gets contained is if both of those countries somehow act together and at the same time. And as this meeting approached, and this is why we love you so much. You reached out to us to say, you know. I have seen this movie before. Big fears, big thoughts about coordination and solutions to big problems. You told us there's a historical parallel. to all of this and maybe a historical solution.
Well, Michael, there is a obvious parallel. We had a era starting in the late nineteen forties and through the Cold War, where two states, the Soviet Union and the United States, had created a potentially terrifying technology that had all kinds of commercial uses but could also bring about civilizational extinction. Nuclear weapons. Weapons and everybody had to go figure out how we were going to get the benefits without getting the terror. And you know what? It took decades to happen. Mm-hmm. These two countries. They locked arms and they came up with agreements that ultimately have brought us to the remarkable moment that there has been no use of a nuclear weapon in anger since nineteen forty five.
Right. Nuclear nonproliferation worked. Nuclear non proliferation. Combined with a balance of terror worked. So now n quite naturally, everybody's looking to that model as we begin to think about how you might contain artificial intelligence, particularly after this summer of surprises that we've had, where we have rogue agents breaking out of their sandboxes. Right. Treat AI the way superpowers treated
nuclear weaponry.
Well, look, if you think that the heads of some of these frontier companies are coming out and saying there is a ten percent chance of civilizational extinction, that's probably a higher proportion chance than there was in the early days of the nuclear era that we would wipe each other off the map. At least it's equivalent. And so now the question is can two very different countries in very different times, China and the United States, come to some kind of framework agreement that could begin to get us there. Okay,
well, given all of that In your capacity, David, as a historian of all the world's great technological dangers,
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the context of the Trump‑Xi meeting and why is AI on the agenda?
0:00–6:18
2
How does David Sanger compare nuclear non‑proliferation to AI safety?
6:18–11:14
3
What lessons does the history of the nuclear arms race teach us about regulating AI?
11:14–15:43
4
Why is the nuclear non‑proliferation model harder to apply to AI today?
15:43–21:16
5
What are the main obstacles to creating an AI‑non‑proliferation treaty?
21:16–27:29
6
How might the United States and China negotiate AI safeguards without harming their economies?
27:29–34:28
7
What role could international inspection and early‑warning mechanisms play in AI governance?
34:28–38:43
Speakers
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