The West doesn’t even dare put soldiers on the ground in Ukraine for fear of an escalating Russian response. This renders the whole idea that even the US might premptively attack a Russian ASI development facility totally unbelievable, and if the US can’t/won’t do that then the whole idea of AI MAD fails and with it goes everything else mentioned here. Maybe you can bully the really small states but it lacks all credibility against a large, economically or militarily powerful state. The comparison to nuclear weapons is also silly in the sense that the outcome of nuclear weapons R&D is known to be a nuclear weapon and the time frame is roughly known whereas the outcome of AI research is unknown and there is no way to identify AI research that crosses whatever line you want to draw other than that provided by human intel.
The West doesn’t even dare put soldiers on the ground in Ukraine for fear of an escalating Russian response. This renders the whole idea that even the US might premptively attack a Russian ASI development facility totally unbelievable, and if the US can’t/won’t do that then the whole idea of AI MAD fails and with it goes everything else mentioned here. Maybe you can bully the really small states but it lacks all credibility against a large, economically or militarily powerful state. The comparison to nuclear weapons is also silly in the sense that the outcome of nuclear weapons R&D is known to be a nuclear weapon and the time frame is roughly known whereas the outcome of AI research is unknown and there is no way to identify AI research that crosses whatever line you want to draw other than that provided by human intel.