Demonstrating Restraint

TL;DR

This paper explores how the United States can adopt a strategy of restraint in AI development to reduce international tensions and prevent extreme preventive actions by adversaries, emphasizing credible commitments and policy-technical layering.

Contribution

It applies international relations theory to AI security, proposing strategies for credible restraint and analyzing their feasibility under different uncertainty levels.

Findings

Restraint can reduce perceived threats and prevent escalation.

Credible commitments are challenging but possible with combined policy and technical efforts.

Uncertainty about capabilities enhances the feasibility of restraint strategies.

Abstract

Some have claimed that the future development of powerful AI systems would enable the United States to shift the international balance of power dramatically in its favor. Such a feat may not be technically possible; even so, if American AI development is perceived as a sufficiently severe threat by its nation-state adversaries, then the risk that they take extreme preventive action against the United States may rise. To bolster its security against preventive action, the United States could aim to pursue a strategy of restraint by demonstrating that it would not use powerful AI to threaten the survival of other nations. Drawing from the international relations literature that explores how states can make credible commitments, we sketch a set of options that the United States could employ to implement this strategy. In the most challenging setting, where it is certain that the US will unilaterally obtain powerful new capabilities, it is difficult to credibly commit to restraint, though an approach that layers significant policy effort with technical breakthroughs may make credibility achievable. If an adversary has realistic levels of uncertainty about the capabilities and intentions of the United States, a strategy of restraint becomes more feasible. Though restraint faces difficulties, it deserves to be weighed against alternative strategies that have been proposed for avoiding conflict during the transition to a world with advanced AI.