Ben Buchanan Wants the U.S. to Win on AI. But Is It a Race or a Trap?

Our guest this week is Ben Buchanan, who served as President Biden’s senior advisor on AI and helped write the first federal AI policy, including the original export controls on GPUs going to China. He is one of the world’s foremost experts on AI governance, and he had a seat at the table at the historic Geneva Summit in 2024 when the U.S. and China first sat down to discuss AI risk.

Now, Ben is out with a new book he co-wrote with Tantum Collins titled “The Bitter Struggle: Superintelligence, Superpowers, and the Fate of the World.” In it, he argues that open societies like the U.S. must win the AI race against closed societies like China to avoid worst-case scenarios.

If you listen to this show, you’ll know that this is a frame we’ve been critical of. Is it really a race between two nations — or a trap that threatens to ensnare us all? In this episode, Ben makes his case for AI competition, explores the growing threat that AI poses to cybersecurity, and outlines the steps he would like to see government take to regulate AI in the coming years.  

You can buy Ben’s book here or wherever books are sold.

CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS

• Ben said that he prefers to use the term competition, rather than "race" to describe the dynamic between the U.S. and China and that the term "race" does not appear in his book in that context. However, the term "race" is used in the book a handful of times to describe the competition, and it is explicitly compared to an "arms race" and the "Space Race" several times. 

• Ben said that President Trump had "reversed" the Biden era export controls. This is only partially true; the Trump administration has reversed many, but not all, of the export controls. 

• Ben said that GPT-2 came out in June, 2019. It was actually February, 2019.

• In describing the state of the country around the release of GPT-3, Ben incorrectly referred to the date of the murder of George Floyd. Floyd was killed on May 25, 2020, three days before the release of GPT3.