“The AI Arms Race Is Not Inevitable. It’s Just Profitable.” by AI Frontiers

Subtitle: In an excerpt from his new book, Garrison Lovely argues that stopping the AGI race is entirely possible, but business interests stand in the way.

Garrison Lovely, Freelance Journalist — October 1, 2026

The noisy discourse surrounding artificial intelligence is hard to parse. Where else can you find Elon Musk siding with the Service Employees International Union against Nancy Pelosi and far-right billionaire Marc Andreessen? Or Steve Bannon agreeing with Barack Obama's national security advisor, Susan Rice, while openly criticizing Donald Trump's policies? Last month, the AI extinction debate went mainstream after resigning Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon's explosive warning that “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” In response, industry leaders called for a collective slowdown in development.

It is not the first time they have suggested that progress should be paced, but the barrier (or excuse) is that they cannot slow down if others don’t. Why is the race so fierce? Because they think whoever first automates AI research and development itself could convert a temporary lead into a permanent one. Their ultimate goal—what they call artificial general intelligence (AGI), but what I call the [...]

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Outline:

(03:25) Chapter 16: Stopping the Obsoleting Project

(03:31) Regulating Math

(07:36) Why Compute Governance Is Failing

(17:18) How would a deal actually work?

(21:23) Why Would China Want To?

(27:11) Just Don't

(29:45) A Path to a Deal

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First published:
October 1st, 2026

Source:
https://newsletter.ai-frontiers.org/p/the-ai-arms-race-is-not-inevitable

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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