2026-07-02
55 分钟I'm Dan Kurtz-Phelan, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
If China were to get a bit more powerful AI, it might be even a stabilizing thing.
If you think about nuclear history again for a second,
the only time when the atom bombs were dropped was when the US had an atomic monopoly.
The moment when other countries had it, the cost of risking the use was very high, and nobody used it.
The breakneck pace of AI progress and the intensity of the competition for AI supremacy
has left US policymakers in a difficult position.
They must encourage the innovation needed to ensure advantage over China and to power economic growth.
They must protect against a national security catastrophe,
and they must assuage the concerns of an anxious and skeptical public.
Sebastian Mallaby calls this the AI trilemma in his most recent essay for Foreign Affairs.
And he argues that it requires more than the piecemeal measures currently on offer in Washington,
or for that matter, in Beijing or Brussels.
Mallaby is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the host of a new podcast
called The Spillover, as well as the author of The Infinity Machine,
an excellent new book about the founding of the AI lab DeepMind.
I spoke with him on June 24th about the state of AI competition,
about the stakes of that competition, and about how its course
will reshape societies, economies, and global politics.
Sebastian, great to have you on the podcast.