“We Don’t Need to Wait for an AI Disaster to Estimate Its Costs” by AI Frontiers

Subtitle: For years, the federal government has required insurers to price hypothetical terrorist attacks. It should run the same exercise for the most severe AI risks.

Daniel Carpenter, Professor of Government at Harvard University, Feodora Douplitzky-Lunati, and Arjun Purohit — August 24, 2026

In April, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and then–Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell gathered leading banks to discuss the threats of Anthropic's new AI model, Claude Mythos. It was a tacit admission: no one, in the public or private sector, is ready for what is coming. The Mythos announcement led top AI firms to attach tighter restrictions to their own models and prompted even relatively laissez-faire voices in the federal government and think tanks to begin considering preapproval regimes for frontier AI models. Wherever those debates go now, Mythos has changed the game, bringing into sharp focus the vast potential scope and scale of catastrophic risks posed by AI—such as an AI-triggered financial meltdown, vast cybersecurity or infrastructure collapse, or enhanced terrorism risk. As a result, companies, the government, engineers, scholars, and all of society are beginning to look for a different set of institutions, whether in regulation or insurance, to manage the risks.

However [...]

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Outline:

(03:16) Analyzing and Insuring Against Novel Threats

(09:15) How TRIP Data Calls Benefit the Public

(16:01) Can the TRIP Model Transfer and Scale?

(21:36) Discussion about this post

(21:40) Ready for more?

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First published:
August 24th, 2026

Source:
https://newsletter.ai-frontiers.org/p/we-dont-need-to-wait-for-an-ai-disaster

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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