I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
We talk about how British and the French made a lot of key innovations early on for the tank,
but it was a German who figured out actually how to use it.
So just
because Anthropoc and OpenAI and Google do great in AI in a private sector economic competition does not mean it is the American birthright that we will have an edge in applying that to cyber operations in a national security context.
In the last few years,
artificial intelligence has become a central arena of geopolitical competition,
and especially of US-China rivalry.
For much of that time, America, or at least American companies, have seemed to have the advantage.
But Ben Buchanan,
a leading scholar of technology who crafted the Biden administration's AI strategy,
worries that America's AI superiority isn't nearly as assured as many have assumed.
In an essay in the November-Acember issue of Foreign Affairs, Buchanan,
writing with Teddy Collins, warns that the American way of developing AI is reaching its limits.
And as those limits become clear, they will start to erode, and perhaps even end, US dominance.
The essay calls for a new grand bargain between tech and the US government,
a grand bargain necessary both to advancing American AI and to ensuring that it enhances rather than undermines US national security.
I recently spoke to Buchanan about the future of AI competition,
and how it could reshape not just American power, but global order itself.
Ben, thank you for joining me and for the SAU and Teddy Collins wrote in our new issue.