Executive summary: The author argues, tentatively and speculatively, that a US-led international AGI development project could be a feasible and desirable way to manage the transition to superintelligence, and sketches a concrete but uncertain design intended to balance monopoly control, safety, and constraints on any single country’s power.
Key points:
The author defines AGI as systems that can perform essentially all economically useful human tasks more cheaply than humans, and focuses on projects meaningfully overseen by multiple governments, especially democratic ones.
Compared to US-only, private, or UN-led alternatives, an international AGI project could reduce dictatorship risk, increase legitimacy, and enable a temporary monopoly that creates breathing room to slow development and manage alignment.
The core desiderata are political feasibility, a short-term monopoly on AGI development, avoidance of single-country control over superintelligence, incentives for non-participants to cooperate, and minimizing irreversible governance lock-in.
The proposed design (“Intelsat for AGI”) centers on a small group of founding democratic countries, weighted voting tied to equity with the US holding 52%, bans on frontier training outside the project, and strong infosecurity and distributed control over compute and model weights.
The author argues the US might join due to cost-sharing, talent access, supply-chain security, and institutional checks on power, while other countries would join to avoid disempowerment if the US otherwise developed AGI alone.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, andcontact us if you have feedback.
Executive summary: The author argues, tentatively and speculatively, that a US-led international AGI development project could be a feasible and desirable way to manage the transition to superintelligence, and sketches a concrete but uncertain design intended to balance monopoly control, safety, and constraints on any single country’s power.
Key points:
The author defines AGI as systems that can perform essentially all economically useful human tasks more cheaply than humans, and focuses on projects meaningfully overseen by multiple governments, especially democratic ones.
Compared to US-only, private, or UN-led alternatives, an international AGI project could reduce dictatorship risk, increase legitimacy, and enable a temporary monopoly that creates breathing room to slow development and manage alignment.
The core desiderata are political feasibility, a short-term monopoly on AGI development, avoidance of single-country control over superintelligence, incentives for non-participants to cooperate, and minimizing irreversible governance lock-in.
The proposed design (“Intelsat for AGI”) centers on a small group of founding democratic countries, weighted voting tied to equity with the US holding 52%, bans on frontier training outside the project, and strong infosecurity and distributed control over compute and model weights.
The author argues the US might join due to cost-sharing, talent access, supply-chain security, and institutional checks on power, while other countries would join to avoid disempowerment if the US otherwise developed AGI alone.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.