Do we really want the infrastructure for the Manhattan Project to be controlled by some capricious Middle Eastern dictatorship?
Words found on the source page on Nov 6, 2026.
More from Leopold Aschenbrenner
EssaySituational Awareness: The Decade AheadJun 4, 2024
But right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness. Through whatever peculiar forces of fate, I have found myself amongst them.EssaySituational Awareness IV: The ProjectJun 4, 2024
By 28/29 the intelligence explosion will be underway; by 2030, we will have summoned superintelligence, in all its power and might.EssaySituational Awareness IV: The ProjectJun 4, 2024
By the early 2030s, the entirety of the US arsenal (like it or not, the bedrock of global peace and security) will probably be obsolete.EssaySituational Awareness: The Decade AheadJun 4, 2024
Hundreds of millions of AGIs could automate AI research, compressing a decade of algorithmic progress (5+ OOMs) into ≤1 year.EssaySituational Awareness I: From GPT-4 to AGIJun 4, 2024
I make the following claim: it is strikingly plausible that by 2027, models will be able to do the work of an AI researcher/engineer.EssaySituational Awareness: The Decade AheadJun 4, 2024
Over the past year, the talk of the town has shifted from $10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters to trillion-dollar clusters.EssaySituational Awareness IIIa: Racing to the Trillion-Dollar ClusterJun 4, 2024
The trillion-dollar, 100GW cluster alone would require ~20% of current US electricity generation in 6 years; together with large inference capacity, demand will be multiples higher.EssaySituational Awareness IV: The ProjectJun 4, 2024
Ultimately, my main claim here is descriptive: whether we like it or not, superintelligence won’t look like an SF startup, and in some way will be primarily in the domain of national security.EssaySituational Awareness IIIa: Racing to the Trillion-Dollar ClusterJun 4, 2024
White-collar workers are paid tens of trillions of dollars in wages annually worldwide; a drop-in remote worker that automates even a fraction of white-collar/cognitive jobs (imagine, say, a truly automated AI coder) would pay for the trillion-dollar cluster.
On the same topics
TalkSpeech at the UN Security CouncilSep 23, 2026
Frontier AI should be licensed like other critical technologies; medicine, aviation, and nuclear energy, to incentivize safe development.TalkSpeech at the UN Security CouncilSep 23, 2026
The race is not a law of nature: it is the product of choices, choices made by the companies themselves.TalkSpeech at the UN Security CouncilSep 23, 2026
We must agree collectively that no one, no company and no country, should develop an AI system that could cause large-scale harm.BlogBanning self-recursive improvement in AI models?Sep 22, 2026
Even if you believe in a deal with China, and I do not, we (and others) now know competitors can catch up more quickly than we had thought, at least if they think they have a chance of winning.BlogBanning self-recursive improvement in AI models?Sep 22, 2026
If the top U.S. labs have to give up on what is supposed to be really important, they will look very “catchable.” The policy creates a big incentive for some other parts of the world to invest a lot more in compute.PressLaunch of the roadmap of the Coalition for Children's Rights and Protection in the Age of AISep 22, 2026
AI must not be placed in the hands of children without first being tested, evaluated, and therefore authorized.
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