We come from different parties and have guided artificial intelligence policy under very different presidents. But we agree: A.I. has become so powerful that, along with its tremendous promise, the technology poses immediate risks to national security. The United States is competing with authoritarian powers for control of A.I.’s future. Yet the country lacks a strong plan to protect the nation from A.I.’s profound dangers.
There are clear steps the government can take that both parties can agree on. But Washington lacks urgency. Unless we change course, A.I. systems will overwhelm the capacity of a distracted and sclerotic U.S. government to manage their development. We believe the United States can avoid this policy failure by quickly embracing a strategic blueprint for A.I. that leaders across the political spectrum can support.
It’s not hype to say that A.I. is likely to be one of the most significant technologies in the history of our species. At the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, A.I. systems could barely put together coherent paragraphs. Today they score above expert humans on a wide variety of tests. We expect that A.I. systems will continue to get a lot better and help researchers to design still more-powerful A.I. systems, accelerating their progress.
The recent announcement from Anthropic about its Claude Mythos Preview model showed how powerful A.I. tools are becoming. The A.I. developer said that Mythos can detect subtle errors in code — and has found thousands of critical vulnerabilities in the basic applications that make computers and the internet work. Some of these vulnerabilities were decades old, lurking in code long thought to be clean. In the wrong hands, Mythos and its successors would enable penetration of vital software and critical infrastructure across the United States, threatening power grids, hospital I.T. systems and the banking system. (Dr. Buchanan is an outside adviser to Anthropic.)
OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 model now consistently outperforms Ph.D.-level virologists at troubleshooting lab experiments in their areas of focus, and Mythos matches top human experts in some capabilities essential to create and deploy bioweapons.
Similarly, A.I. systems have strong and growing capability in materials science, software development and industrial processes — all fundamental to designing and producing all sorts of new weapons. In the Ukraine conflict, A.I. is enabling even the weapons themselves to be more autonomous. While in government, each of us tried to push the United States to use A.I. more in its military and intelligence operations, with appropriate guardrails.
