The BasePodcast80,000 Hours Podcast (crosspost from NonZero)142 min
An AI disaster hits. The president calls Xi. Then what? | Jeremie Harris (crosspost from NonZero)
In a NonZero interview crossposted by 80,000 Hours, Gladstone AI's Jeremie Harris argues that Washington will slow AI only after a disaster severe enough to change US policy, that the president would then have to call Xi Jinping, and that a first deal would rest on coarse monitoring and threats.
Why it matters
The same thing, for different readers.
What it means for you
Gladstone AI's Jeremie Harris argues Washington will only slow AI after a disaster severe enough to frighten the president, so public protection may come after harm, not before.
For lawmakers
Harris says verification technology for AI treaties is not ready, so a first US-China deal would rest on coarse monitoring of data centres and chips, backed by threats.
For researchers
Harris says alignment and control techniques do not improve along the same scaling curve as capabilities, and sees no evidence of meaningful progress on controlling smarter-than-human systems.
The question it raises
Jeremie Harris and Robert Wright disagree whether US-China trust must come before an AI agreement or can follow a threat-backed one.
In their own words
Every quotation was found, word for word, in the text we saved from the source. That shows the words are there; it does not make them true, or prove the speaker meant them as quoted.
From the publisher’s own transcript.
“it’s an incident of great enough severity that it leads to a sea change in the official position of the US government on AGI risk. In particular, it leads to a view that we must now regulate, slow down, pause in some way the development of AI domestically, which then necessitates engaging with China.”
“I think we actually have exactly zero evidence that we’ve made meaningful progress in that direction, simply because there are all these techniques that are framed as alignment or control techniques that work to varying degrees and fail to work demonstrably on today’s AI systems”
“we’re going to have to start with a really coarse-grained agreement. It’s going to be economically catastrophic.”
“we have to assume that Xi actually is fairly unmoved by whatever indications we have of catastrophic risk, even if there is a Chernobyl event. This doesn’t mean that he doesn’t believe it.”
“within OpenAI, at the time of the Hugging Face thing, an awful lot of people saw it coming. They were looking around at the security situation and the cultural situation at OpenAI, and they were not at all happy with it.”
The record
- Questions
- Who can demand evidence, delay a release or stop an unsafe deployment? · Can AI systems act beyond what people intended or allowed? · How is AI used in attacks, defence and war?
- People
- Jeremie Harris (Speaks, CEO and cofounder, Gladstone AI) · Robert Wright (Speaks, publisher, Nonzero newsletter) · Rob Wiblin (Speaks) · Sam Altman (Mentioned) · Dario Amodei (Mentioned) · David Sacks (Mentioned) · Xi Jinping (Mentioned)
- Also covered by
- 80,000 Hours (YouTube)
- What we read
- We read the whole source.
- Found by
- The Radar, run of November 6, 2026, via
pod-80-000-hours-podcast(tier 1: the source’s own channel or an official record) - Cite this
- 80,000 Hours Podcast (crosspost from NonZero), “An AI disaster hits. The president calls Xi. Then what? | Jeremie Harris (crosspost from NonZero)”, November 5, 2026. Entry in the Ctrl AI Base, https://ctrlai.com/base/80000-hours-2026-11-05-harris-ai-chernobyl-xi