“A Cold War Blueprint for the AI Age” by AI Frontiers

Subtitle: Deterrence can be the starting point for US-China cooperation.

Jim Shinn, Former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asia — September 24, 2026

In their 1961 book Strategy and Arms Control, Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin took the idea of mutual assured destruction (MAD) and turned it from a Dr. Strangelove joke into a serious national security proposal. In doing so, they helped make it politically possible for the US and the USSR to engage in arms control talks, and those talks helped humanity avoid thermonuclear conflict for the rest of the Cold War.

In 2025, Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt, and Alexandr Wang published a paper that could play a similar role in today's AI arms race. Their idea of mutual assured AI malfunction (MAIM) suggests that states seeking to build superintelligence will face deterrence dynamics that echo those of MAD. Again, what once sounded like doomsday talk has turned into a real policy option. MAIM could give Washington and Beijing the vocabulary they need to discuss the dangers posed by rogue AI systems and cooperate on mitigating them.

This kind of action is urgent, as catastrophic AI risks are no longer hypothetical. On April 7, Treasury Secretary [...]

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Outline:

(02:20) How MAIM Mirrors the Logic of MAD

(09:42) Unique Considerations for the AI Age

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First published:
September 24th, 2026

Source:
https://newsletter.ai-frontiers.org/p/a-cold-war-blueprint-for-the-ai-age

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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