Epistemic status: conditioning on things I consider unlikely, many undiscussed considerations, not the whole story, etc. I'm not trying to advance any claims about whether this is good or bad, or what to do about it (if anything).

I sometimes see concern about loss of most future value as a result of e.g. the US government[1] taking control of the future by seizing control of superintelligence[2] and then having bad values/doing dumb things with it. (A couple random[3] examples, though I feel like I'm picking up a lot of this kind of thing in the local vibes.) If you condition on ASI alignment being tractable[4] this doesn't seem like a totally crazy thing to worry about[5].

However, I think there's a pretty straightforward argument for why e.g. the US government might not be able to usefully take control of a frontier lab at or after the point where most of their research progress is being driven by AIs, rather than by humans[6].

Imagine you're Anthropic, and you're in the process of entering the RSI loop, where you're handing off larger and larger parts of your R&D to autonomous AI researchers. You are not on incredibly friendly terms with [...]

The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
July 12th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DgTy3DC8rEw7a72rx/the-us-government-may-find-it-difficult-to-seize-control

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“The US Government may find it difficult to seize control during takeoff” by RobertM

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“The US Government may find it difficult to seize control during takeoff” by RobertM