Jacob Stokes urged the US to prepare scenarios for deterring China in the race for AGI
Former White House official Jacob Stokes called on the United States to prepare for scenarios in which it could consider extreme measures to prevent China from achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) first. Among the possible tools, he named diplomatic, espionage, cyber, and coercive measures, including military strikes on Chinese data centers.
Assessment of possible actions
As the South China Morning Post reports, Stokes, deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), voiced this position during an online event on Thursday.
According to him, the US Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and other agencies should begin assessing what intelligence might be needed to justify such actions. Stokes compared this approach to the way policymakers studied the characteristics of nuclear weapons and determined their political implications.
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Report on competition in AI
In the CNAS report “Superpowers and AGI,” released last week, Stokes called on the US government to consider the feasibility of diplomatic, espionage, cyber, and coercive measures to prevent China from being the first to achieve AGI.
AGI is a hypothetical artificial intelligence system capable of performing a broad range of tasks at a human level. The report examines how the possible emergence of AGI could affect geopolitical competition between the United States and China.
According to Epoch AI’s assessment, the United States is currently several months ahead of China in the development of advanced AI models. At the same time, Stokes suggested that China could make an unexpected technological breakthrough, come closer to AGI, or achieve it first, citing Chinese developments in robotics and other areas of embodied AI.
