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Artificial General Intelligence's Five Hard National Security Problems
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A RAND Corporation policy brief identifying five critical national security challenges posed by AGI emergence, relevant to AI safety governance and risk assessment frameworks.
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Importance: 62/100policy briefanalysis
Summary
This RAND paper identifies five hard national security problems posed by AGI: wonder weapons, systemic power shifts, WMD proliferation to nonexperts, artificial entities with agency, and instability. The authors argue that current policy discourse often addresses these problems in isolation, with solutions to one potentially undermining progress on others. They propose these five categories as a common framework for structuring AGI strategy and risk evaluation.
Key Points
- •Five hard AGI national security problems: wonder weapons, systemic power shifts, WMD proliferation, artificial agents with agency, and instability.
- •Proposals addressing one problem can inadvertently undermine or ignore progress on another, highlighting the need for integrated strategy.
- •AGI emergence is considered plausible and worthy of serious attention despite deep uncertainty about pace and trajectory.
- •The framework aims to provide common language for policymakers and analysts to evaluate alternative AGI strategies.
- •Published by RAND in February 2025, targeting U.S. national security community strategists and policymakers.
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PE-A3691-4
Artificial General Intelligence's Five Hard National Security Problems
Jim Mitre, Joel B. Predd
Expert InsightsPublished Feb 10, 2025
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The potential emergence of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is plausible and should be taken seriously by the U.S. national security community. Yet the pace and potential progress of AGI's emergence — as well as the composition of a post-AGI future — is shrouded in a cloud of uncertainty. This poses a challenge for strategists and policymakers trying to discern what potential threats and opportunities might emerge on the path to AGI and once AGI is achieved.
This paper puts forth five hard problems that AGI's emergence presents for U.S. national security: (1) wonder weapons, (2) systemic shifts in power, (3) nonexperts empowered to develop weapons of mass destruction, (4) artificial entities with agency, and (5) instab
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