{"id":290763,"date":"2026-02-19T00:34:14","date_gmt":"2026-02-19T00:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/290763\/"},"modified":"2026-02-19T00:34:14","modified_gmt":"2026-02-19T00:34:14","slug":"ai-and-nationalism-are-a-deadly-combination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/290763\/","title":{"rendered":"AI and Nationalism Are a Deadly Combination"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dario Amodei, the CEO of leading AI company Anthropic, has written a 19,000 word warning <\/a>that AI technology could spell disaster for humanity. While insisting that he and his company are developing AI responsibly, Amodei says that we are facing unprecedented risks, in part because AI is soon going to have a much greater capacity to help people and governments commit crimes against humanity. AI models, Amodei says, are getting smarter all the time, and it may soon be possible for nefarious actors to commit absolute mayhem with them, including releasing engineered pathogens, creating child sex abuse images on a massive scale, killing people with swarms of tiny drones, manipulating and blackmailing millions of people simultaneously, and more. We are, he says, at a crucial moment that will determine whether our species is capable of dealing with an exponential increase in our power to inflict cruelty and destruction, and because the technology is advancing faster than anyone expected, \u201cwe have no time to waste.\u201d <\/p>\n

For instance: I don\u2019t know if you remember the COVID-19 pandemic, but a tiny virus that started out by infecting a single person soon spread across the entire world and killed seven million people<\/a>. Well, thanks to AI products like the one Amodei is developing, he says that it may soon be possible for plenty of people to develop and release new deadly viruses. AI models are like having a \u201cgenius in everyone\u2019s pocket,\u201d \u201cessentially making everyone a PhD virologist who can be walked through the process of designing, synthesizing, and releasing a biological weapon step-by-step.\u201d AI might potentially tell deranged loners how to engineer weapons of mass destruction in their garages. Oh, and lest you think that powerful AI can simply be used to figure out how to stop the threat, Amodei informs us that \u201cthere is an asymmetry between attack and defense in biology, because agents spread rapidly on their own, while defenses require detection, vaccination, and treatment to be organized across large numbers of people very quickly in response.\u201d Oh dear. <\/p>\n

Easy access to biological weapons is only the beginning. Amodei says it\u2019s the threat he\u2019s most worried about, but he believes AI will confer \u201cunimaginable power\u201d in many domains, and some of the possibilities he outlines for our future include: massive cyberattacks of unprecedented effectiveness, governments and corporations addicting people to AI-generated propaganda and manipulating their behavior, swarms of billions of autonomous armed AI-powered drones that will decide who to kill, and a \u201cglobal totalitarian dictatorship\u201d that uses AI to create an absolute panopticon in which everything anyone ever does or says is completely accessible to the state. <\/p>\n

Oh, and if that\u2019s not bad enough already, we\u2019re all going to lose our jobs, and the wealth gap is going to escalate exponentially because all of the value generated by these technologies will be captured by the oligarchs who own them while the rest of us will see ourselves become economically worthless as the skills we developed over a lifetime are automated. Oh, and while I\u2019ve been talking about ways in which people might misuse AI in pursuit of their ends, the AI might also develop its own malicious goals and try to enslave humanity. Oh, and of course this will all consume a fantastic quantity of energy and probably exacerbate the climate crisis. <\/p>\n

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One should take these prophecies with grain of salt, given that Amodei has a financial interest in hyping up the claims of his product\u2019s usefulness and potential. The more people believe his company\u2019s work is going to shape the human future, the more valuable that company becomes, and the richer he gets. But let us assume for the moment there is at least some chance he is right about what is around the corner. Given these horrendous possibilities, one might wonder why Amodei is working so hard to develop a technology that is \u201clikely to continuously lower the barrier to destructive activity on a larger and larger scale,\u201d which seems like it is likely to usher in a hell on earth. A person might well ask why we are pushing forward at such speed to create something that carries such terrible risks, something that produces what he thinks could reasonably be called \u201cthe single most serious national security threat we\u2019ve faced in a century, possibly ever.\u201d Part of the answer is that Amodei thinks <\/a>that AI does have the potential to do us an immense amount of good, if it doesn\u2019t kill millions of people in the process. But why move so fast? Shouldn\u2019t we proceed very slowly and carefully if these are the stakes? Well, for Amodei, we can\u2019t. One reason, discussed before in this magazine<\/a>, is capitalism. Capitalist firms stand to make huge amounts of money from this technology, so they have an incentive to ignore safety risks, even when they themselves acknowledge that the risks are extreme. If we don\u2019t build it first, someone else will, and whoever does so will make a vast fortune. <\/p>\n

But an important additional reason for the haste and recklessness with which Amodei and his colleagues are pursuing a dystopian technology is their childlike, Manichean view of the world, in which \u201cthe democracies\u201d are locked in battle against \u201cthe autocracies.\u201d Internationally, the same \u201cif we don\u2019t build it, they will\u201d logic necessitates an arms race. (The White House has even embraced an \u201cAI Manhattan Project<\/a>.\u201d) The \u201cthreat of the CCP taking the lead in AI\u201d creates an \u201cexistential imperative to prevent them from doing so.\u201d Fully autonomous weapons may sound frightening, but we must build them, because they have \u201clegitimate uses in defending democracy.\u201d Because \u201cthe only way to respond to autocratic threats is to match and outclass them militarily,\u201d Amodei says that \u201cAnthropic considers it important to provide AI to the intelligence and defense communities in the US.\u201d In other words, despite having just explained the terrible power these systems confer on their possessors, Amodei is actively working to refine that power and hand it to the world\u2019s most lethal military machine, which is currently under the control of an unhinged imperialist billionaire who just invaded one sovereign country<\/a> and is currently trying to starve another into submission<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Ironically, while Amodei\u2019s essay is all about how to mitigate the risks from AI, I\u2019m quite terrified of the risks of his own worldview. He reveals that even the most thoughtful and risk-aware of our Silicon Valley tech overlords have a shockingly simplistic view of international relations, in which We (the Good Democracies) must stop Them (the Bad Autocracies). Amodei recommends that the democracies form an \u201centente,\u201d a strategic alliance that tries to develop powerful AI before the autocracies in order to keep them in check. <\/p>\n

Amodei doesn\u2019t seem to have much historical awareness, but those of us who do might shudder at the word \u201centente,\u201d with its echoes of the pre-World War I alliance system that ended in such utter catastrophe. An important lesson of the \u201cGreat War\u201d is that if the world separates into two alliance blocs, armed to the teeth and prepared to destroy one another, even a small incident can trigger a catastrophic conflict, because a local conflict will become a global one by drawing in all of the allies in the bloc. As I read about the dangers of AI-enhanced weaponry, my first thought is that we must, at all costs, keep a third world war<\/a> from breaking out. Amodei does not spend any time discussing the possibility that his \u201centente\u201d system could polarize the world and set the stage for the most disastrous war in human history. (One commentator calls<\/a> his \u201ccrush China\u201d approach to AI safety a recipe for a \u201csuicide race.\u201d) <\/p>\n

Amodei is highly perturbed by the possibility of the Chinese Communist Party developing more advanced AI than the U.S., because China is \u201ccurrently autocratic and operates a high-tech surveillance state.\u201d This is part of why his company must help the U.S. government develop new weapons technology. But the argument is strange. Amodei concedes that \u201cthe Chinese people themselves\u201d are the ones \u201cmost likely to suffer from the CCP\u2019s AI-enabled repression.\u201d That\u2019s because being \u201cauthoritarian\u201d is an internal characteristic of countries. It does not mean the country poses a threat to others. <\/p>\n

If we were serious about assessing the threat posed by certain countries being the first to develop powerful new AI-enabled weaponry, the question we would ask is not whether the country is \u201cautocratic,\u201d but whether it is \u201caggressive,\u201d meaning that it poses threats beyond its own borders. Yes, it will be disturbing if the Chinese government is able to use AI to further entrench its power over the population, but it\u2019s not clear why the U.S. would fear this possibility, unless China was an aggressive country that posed a threat to us. <\/p>\n

I think one reason Amodei discusses the world in terms of \u201cauthoritarian\u201d versus \u201cdemocratic\u201d countries is that if he instead discussed aggressive countries versus defensive countries, he\u2019d have to acknowledge that the U.S. poses far more of a threat to other countries in the world than China does. The U.S. has a far worse track record in the 21st century of abusing international law. Donald Trump is currently extrajudicially executing foreign subjects<\/a> in the Caribbean whenever he deems them to be trafficking substances that are \u201ccontrolled\u201d under domestic U.S. law. Trump claims the right to depose any government he deems to be undermining U.S. national security interests, and simply kidnapped the president of Venezuela on bogus charges in order to take the country\u2019s oil. The U.S. is actively trying to achieve regime change in Iran and Cuba right now, has threatened to seize Greenland by force, is arming and funding the Israeli government as it ethnically cleanses Palestine, and is doing everything possible to undermine the effectiveness of international institutions like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court<\/a> that try to curb misconduct and ensure states resolve conflicts with diplomacy rather than violence. <\/p>\n

The U.S. record of aggression is obscene and horrifying, from the invasion of Vietnam in the 1960s, to the overthrow of governments around the world, to meddling in elections, to launching the massively destabilizing post-9\/11 wars that caused the largest displacement of human beings since World War II. China has nothing remotely comparable to this record of lawless aggression. Is it really the case that the U.S., the only country that has ever dropped a nuclear weapon on a civilian population, can be trusted with the unfathomable destructive power that new AI technology confers?<\/p>\n

Appreciating that the \u201cdemocratic\u201d U.S. is not more trustworthy than the \u201cautocratic\u201d China is important, because it undermines a central claim of Amodei\u2019s case for an arms race. China has consistently been the country warning against a hostile Cold War mentality developing between the two nations, while American politicians conjure a baseless \u201cChina threat.\u201d Despite its lack of internal political freedoms, China is a far more rational and trustworthy actor on the global stage than the U.S., which is currently run by people who can only be described as \u201cmaniacs.\u201d (Stephen Miller <\/a>who probably thinks his neighborhood taco stand is an Al-Qaeda front, JD Vance who \u201cdoesn\u2019t give a shit<\/a>\u201d if state-sanctioned murder is labeled a war crime, Pete Hegseth who thinks<\/a> Muslims are at war with our civilization, and Mike Huckabee who is preparing<\/a> for the End Times). Given the threats that AI poses, there is no reason why we should not try to work with China and other leading global powers to adopt a rational, careful framework for the implementation of this technology. It does not help when people like Amodei suggest that China\u2019s internal repression means that we must treat it as an existential threat to the U.S., a conclusion that simply does not follow and for which he provides no evidence. <\/p>\n

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It worries me that a tech leader like Amodei, who is conscious of the risks his product is creating, is so ill-informed when it comes to international relations. For instance, he doesn\u2019t talk at all about the important concept of the \u201csecurity dilemma<\/a>,\u201d in which actions that one nation takes \u201cdefensively\u201d are perceived as aggression by other nations, leading to the possibility of a spiraling arms race and an unnecessary conflict. But by emphasizing hostility toward China rather than cooperation with it, Amodei is making precisely this kind of situation more likely, and creating the very danger he says he wishes to avoid.<\/p>\n

I have gone from someone skeptical of AI\u2019s power to someone deeply worried about the very risks that Amodei discusses in his essay. But my fear is less of the technology itself than the fact that it is being developed by people like Amodei, who believe in (1) free market capitalism and (2) nationalism, two incredibly dangerous ideologies. Amodei\u2019s capitalistic instincts show in his skepticism about regulating the technology (too much government regulation, he warns, will \u201cpotentially destroy economic value\u201d) and his suggestion that the inequality caused by AI can be addressed by rich people voluntarily giving their money away (\u201c a large part of the way out of this economic dilemma,\u201d he says, is the rich feeling \u201ca strong obligation to society at large,\u201d to which I say, fat chance). His nationalism shows in his view of China as an existential threat as opposed to simply another country comprised of human beings with the same basic desires and fears as we have. <\/p>\n

My worry about AI is that it is being introduced in a world divided into nation-states, where too many people think as Amodei does, and see their particular country as being locked in competition with others, instead of as part of a human family that must work together through international institutions to ensure our collective survival and prosperity. Amodei does not mention the United Nations once, even though ending U.S. hostility toward it and increasing the UN\u2019s ability to effectively regulate technology is crucial to ensuring the worst risks he discusses will not come to pass. Unfortunately, Americans in particular seem to increasingly treat international law as a dead letter, and by treating it this way they make it so, even though robust American support for international law could give it teeth and keep it from slipping into obsolescence. <\/p>\n

So, yes, Amodei is right that we are entering a terrifying and perilous moment for our species. But what he does not realize is that his own childish view of the world, in which The Good Guys must engage in an AI arms race with the Autocrats (an arms race that, incidentally, will be very profitable for his company) heightens the risk of the worst possible outcome of all: a world war in which both sides use AI to engineer destruction on a scale that will make World War Two look like a petty skirmish. <\/p>\n

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