The Closing Window: How Governments Could Lose Their Ability to Restrain Advanced AI

As AI capabilities advance, AI systems will pose greater risks to national security and potentially humanity as a whole. Governments may eventually conclude that these risks warrant restraining AI development. This motivates the question: will governments still be able to restrain AI development in the future, should they want to do so? In this paper we analyze which world events and changes to the state of AI development would make future governance more difficult or even effectively impossible. Our analysis surfaces likely pathways that would lead to these difficulties, including hardware proliferation, continued algorithmic progress, and the release of catastrophically dangerous AI models. Due to the field’s lack of understanding of AI development, it may be difficult or impossible to know when we will hit a “point of no return”, and we therefore recommend a conservative approach. The window may be closing, but governments currently have an opportunity to preserve their optionality if they act soon. Our policy recommendations would enable governments to restrain AI development in the future, while imposing relatively small costs today.