This point has been made previously here and here, but I think the possibility of war is much more relevant now that people have somewhat longer timelines.
What is especially interesting is the ability of the war to prevent the Slowdown Ending. How likely are the amounts of compute of the two sides to become ~equal, causing both sides to race all the way to doom? Because the AI-2027 forecast by @Daniel Kokotajlo et al would have to be rewritten as follows: Taiwan gets invaded; DeepSeek et al are merged into DeepCent; OpenAI, Anthropic et al unite their efforts into OpenBrain well before[1] misalignment got revealed and either keep racing or fail to regain the lead. DeepCent would also have to race as hard as it can in order to either avoid falling behind or avoid losing its newly found leadership. As a result, mankind either ends up with one side having an aligned AI weaker than the other’s misaligned one or[2] with a mutual race.
What is especially interesting is the ability of the war to prevent the Slowdown Ending. How likely are the amounts of compute of the two sides to become ~equal, causing both sides to race all the way to doom? Because the AI-2027 forecast by @Daniel Kokotajlo et al would have to be rewritten as follows: Taiwan gets invaded; DeepSeek et al are merged into DeepCent; OpenAI, Anthropic et al unite their efforts into OpenBrain well before[1] misalignment got revealed and either keep racing or fail to regain the lead. DeepCent would also have to race as hard as it can in order to either avoid falling behind or avoid losing its newly found leadership. As a result, mankind either ends up with one side having an aligned AI weaker than the other’s misaligned one or[2] with a mutual race.
The AI-2027 forecast itself had the USA do so in response to Agent-4 being misaligned and the leading company’s lobbyists trying to regain the lead.
Of cource, there also is the alternative of international coordination, but it is far harder due to the invasion.