AI Frontiers

Subtitle: Most AI biorisk studies look at how AI models might help novices complete biological tasks. But experts with AI assistance could be far more dangerous.

Sumnima Singh — November 12, 2026

Things were not going well for me in the lab. I had just started my PhD, studying how our immune system evolved to protect us against infections. To move this project forward, I needed to detect certain antibodies in blood samples. That required an experiment using western blotting, a laboratory technique for identifying specific proteins, which typically takes about a week. But I had never worked in a lab before, and western blotting is famously finicky. I was lucky to have a strong mentor and detailed protocols to follow. Still, month after month, the experiment failed.

Eventually, almost in passing, a colleague with years of experience in western blotting suggested that the culprit might be a degraded reagent: the running buffer. In western blotting, this key chemical solution carries the electric current that separates proteins in a gel so that they can be detected. Sure enough, when I prepared a fresh batch of the buffer and ran the two experiments side by side, the fresh buffer [...]

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Outline:

(03:41) What Existing Evaluations of AI in Biology Actually Measure

(10:25) Why Expertise Could Amplify the Advantage of AI Assistance

(14:50) Why Expert Uplift Could Change Biological Risk

(17:35) Putting Expert Uplift to the Test

(21:52) Implications for AI-Biosecurity

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Subtitle: Nationalizing AI would do more harm than good. Narrower government powers, like taxation and the right to pause AI, can address issues from inequality to catastrophic risk.

Yonathan Arbel, Professor of Law at the University of Alabama, Simon Goldstein, Professor at the University of Hong Kong, and Peter N. Salib, Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center — November 6, 2026

Lately, everyone seems to want to nationalize AI. US Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, under which the federal government would take a 50% equity stake in various large AI companies. President Trump has also reportedly discussed the idea of frontier AI companies “voluntarily” giving a small equity stake to the US government. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has publicly mused that “it might be better if building AGI were a government project.” These are strange bedfellows.

What is going on? These proposals do not, in fact, agree on a common goal or means of implementation. Some involve the US government seizing a large share of AI companies’ ordinary stock. Others involve no stock, but instead rely on aggressive interpretations of the Defense Production Act of 1950. This [...]

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Outline:

(03:02) What Is Nationalization?

(04:17) Nationalization Is Usually Bad

(06:30) Ordinary Legal Tools Can Handle Most AI Harms

(10:52) Catastrophic AI Risk Needs a Stronger Mitigation Tool

(17:11) The "Halt Right"

(22:48) Two Objections

(24:37) Pacing the Frontier

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Subtitle: AI will create a trillion-dollar resilience industry. The Federal Government can seed its champions today.

Lachlan Carroll, Luke Drago, Member of Technical Staff at Thinking Machines, and Finn Metz, Co-Founder of Seldon Lab — October 19, 2026

After this spring's arrival of new AI models with enhanced cyber capabilities, monthly disclosures of serious cyber vulnerabilities at major tech companies have surged far above anything seen in the previous four years. At the same time, headlines about new frontiers, from designing new viral genomes to outperforming world-champion debaters at persuasion, are hinting at the challenges AI innovations may bring.

These developments make plain that, if we are going to harness the benefits of AI, we must also build resilience to its disruptions. Such fortification will require developing new technology. But, even when we can see disruptions coming, there's a lag between their arrival and their real-world impacts; that lag deters private investors from funding startups that address AI's risks. If we wait until the market for defensive technologies fully materializes, we will have waited too long to build those technologies. The US government can make these bets now, so that America is ready when the market needs them.

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Outline:

(02:18) What Is AI Resilience?

(06:05) Washington Can Give Resilience Startups a Head Start

(11:20) America's Seed Fund Can Back AI-Resilience Startups

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Subtitle: AI is poised to accelerate the industrialization of space. The nation that leads in AI might secure control of the space frontier before rivals realize it's too late to catch up.

Daniel King, Research Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and Laura Hiscott, Staff Writer for AI Frontiers — October 8, 2026

The opening moves to industrialize space will look like a string of ordinary business decisions. Consider a space-services company that begins assembling solar arrays in orbit. It supplies power to its customers but also to itself. To keep installations running, it sends along robots that inspect, assemble, and replace modules or faulty components. The company deploys more of these machines as its customer base grows, and soon, it is producing enough specialized robots to run orbital shipyards and small off-Earth factories. Each of these activities on its own serves an intelligible commercial need, but together, they form the foundations of a general industrial economy beyond Earth.

Space agencies and private companies have entertained this vision of the future for decades, but it has remained technologically out of reach. Now, artificial intelligence may be poised to advance space timelines dramatically through automation. The spoils of [...]

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Outline:

(02:32) Automating the Space Frontier

(07:17) First-Mover Advantages

(12:09) Does Winner Take All?

(15:52) Self-Replicating Spacecraft

(19:55) Military Escalation

(27:00) The Point of No Return

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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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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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Subtitle: Consciousness, sentience, and agency are three ways that something could matter morally. In AI, unlike in animals, they may not come as a package.

Jeff Sebo, Professor at New York University — September 17, 2026

As AI systems become more advanced and widespread, people will naturally wonder whether they deserve moral consideration. This is a thorny question, and it involves uncertainty about both ethics and science. For example, which properties are morally significant? Should we focus on consciousness (the capacity for subjective experience), sentience (the capacity for positive and negative experience), or agency (the capacity to set and pursue goals)? Which of these properties, if any, might AI systems have, today or in the future?

“Studying AI Welfare Empirically,” a new report from the NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy and Eleos AI Research that I co-led, addresses such questions. In this article, I highlight a key challenge for this field: even if consciousness, sentience, and agency often occur together in humans and other animals, they might occur separately in AI systems. Therefore, we need to study each capacity individually. We also need to be ready for unexpected configurations, such as sentience existing in one part [...]

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Outline:

(02:16) How Can We Study Consciousness in AI?

(09:19) What about Sentience and Agency?

(16:54) Which Entity Are We Studying in the First Place?

(22:43) Next Steps for the Field

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Subtitle: Utilitarians at AI companies imagine a cosmos filled with blissful AIs. They might risk human extinction to achieve it.

Dan Hendrycks, Director of the Center for AI Safety — September 9, 2026

For millennia, philosophers have argued over the principles that should guide moral decision-making. Within countries and across the world today, humans continue to hold a huge variety of moral worldviews. However, within AI corporations, employees’ beliefs are far from representative of the wider population. In fact, a large fraction of people involved in AI development subscribe to—or heavily lean toward—a utilitarian worldview with the central goal of maximizing total wellbeing (the sum of pleasure minus suffering across all sentient beings). As innocent as this may initially sound, it can lead to recommendations that most people would consider appalling, including the elimination of humankind.

In this essay we outline the utilitarian worldview, showing how its demand for “species impartiality” could ultimately recommend that humans be replaced with AIs. We show that utilitarian beliefs are sincerely held among those influencing AI development today, and that this could jeopardize humanity's future.

For simplicity, when we say “utilitarianism,” we are referring to total utilitarianism, which aims to maximize the [...]

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Outline:

(02:22) Utilitarianism and Impartiality

(04:34) Implications of Utilitarianism in a World with AI

(09:45) Successionism: Accelerationists and Utilitarians

(14:19) Why Utilitarianism Could Become a Real-World Catastrophe

(18:46) Preventing Utilitarianism from Replacing Humans with AIs

(21:22) Conclusion

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Subtitle: Public-key encryption keeps your messaging and web browsing private, but it depends on shaky math assumptions. AI-powered math might break it.

Govind Pimpale, Research Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation — September 9, 2026

Over the past few months, AI models have started resolving major mathematical problems, including ones that have withstood decades of human effort. Claude Fable disproved the Jacobian conjecture in three dimensions, and OpenAI announced a list of 10 problems that its Astra model solved or made significant progress on. Even more recently, an unreleased OpenAI model solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, one of the most famous open problems in mathematics.

These are tremendous accomplishments, but very little about our day-to-day life will actually change as a result. This is because most well-known open mathematical questions are relatively insulated from practical applications. However, there are a few open mathematical problems that do have serious real-world implications. Chief among these is whether public-key encryption is fundamentally secure: that is, whether two strangers can share a secret message over public channels, such as the internet, without eavesdroppers having an efficient way to decipher it.

We rely on public-key encryption every day for end-to-end encrypted [...]

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Outline:

(03:10) A Brief History of Public-Key Encryption

(07:18) Cryptomania or Minicrypt?

(11:20) AI and Cryptanalysis

(14:39) Living in Minicrypt

(19:33) Takeaways and Mitigations

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Subtitle: Several US states have moved to ban AI legal status and reject the possibility of AI consciousness. We should keep our options open instead.

Heather Alexander, Cofounder of the Lab for the Future of Citizenship and Lucius Caviola, Professor at the University of Cambridge — September 1, 2026

Should AI systems be able to get married in Wisconsin? With humans increasingly forming relationships with AI, this was the question taken up by several state lawmakers earlier this year. Wisconsin's AB 959 would have barred AI systems from marrying or holding any other rights or responsibilities under the law, as well as declared that AI systems are not conscious, sentient, or self-aware. Wisconsin's bill is part of a wave of similar legislation introduced in 12 states since 2022.

We believe that these “exclusion bills” are premature. Some scholars believe legal status could be useful for holding sophisticated AI systems accountable for crimes and harms, and bills that preempt this possibility needlessly limit our future options. Meanwhile, scientists disagree about whether AI consciousness is possible, and legislation cannot resolve an active scientific debate. Finally, the question of whether an AI-human relationship is “real” is deeply personal and philosophical, and [...]

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Outline:

(01:49) The Exclusion Bills

(04:50) Can AI Be a "Person"?

(08:41) The Case for Exclusion

(11:12) Keeping Our Options Open

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