Joshua Achiam @jachiam0
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Joshua Achiam @jachiam0 · 7h I would like to be an optimist on this issue but I'm not. One of the main challenges to effective international collaboration on AI safety issues is that the question of what rules should even be in play is so incredibly ambiguous that every serious attempt will appear provocative from a national security perspective. The other main challenge is that the issues do not begin and end at AI chat behaviors or AI agent behaviors: there is a blurry continuum between AI safety, the pace of progress in every other field of science and technology, and economic success. Efforts to coordinate between the US and China to restrict these other topics will surface very quickly that the US and China do not have common ground on either to what degree, or how at all, to pace such things. I suspect everyone on our side of the equation is likely to be very myopic about what productive AI safety collaboration will look like, and they will initially stick to issues that feel urgent and burning, like avoiding cybersecurity catastrophes inflicted by AI agents, framed around preventing loss of control. But then after a year or two they will be forced to shift tack to specifics on frontier science as AI-accelerated frontier science begins unlocking advances in theory, materials, drugs, and synthetic biology that pose other risks. The tendendcy on the US AI safety side is to pursue maximalist "shut it down" approaches; it seems unlikely to me that alarmism about new subjects will register as anything other than an attempt to impose a kind of US hegemony on China, and correspondingly it will fall apart.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Long tweet by Joshua Achiam on why US-China AI safety collaboration is likely to be hard: ambiguity of rules, the continuum between safety and general scientific/economic progress, and maximalist 'shut it down' approaches reading as US hegemony.
us-chinaai safety governanceinternational collaborationachiam