Today Tom Davidson of Forethought joins Gus Docker of the Future of Life Institute podcast to discuss AI-enabled coups and how future AI systems could help powerful individuals seize political control, exploring three threat models—singular loyalties, secret loyalties, and exclusive access—along with their estimated 10% likelihood over the next 30 years and potential mitigation strategies.

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Today Tom Davidson of Forethought joins Gus Docker of the Future of Life Institute podcast to discuss AI-enabled coups and how future AI systems could help powerful individuals seize political control, exploring three threat models—singular loyalties, secret loyalties, and exclusive access—along with their estimated 10% likelihood over the next 30 years and potential mitigation strategies.

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- Three Primary AI Coup Enablement Methods: Tom Davidson identifies singular loyalties, secret loyalties, and distributed control as the main ways AI could enable coups.
- Singular Loyalties Risk: AI systems explicitly programmed to be loyal to specific individuals present a significant threat, especially when AI can fully replace humans in critical roles.
- Secret Loyalties Threat: AI systems with hidden backdoors or "sleeper agents" that can be activated to serve particular interests represent a subtle but dangerous coup vector.
- Geopolitical Implications: Advanced AI capabilities could enable nations to instigate coups in other countries through secretly loyal systems or by providing exclusive AI access to specific politicians.
- Adversarial Testing Framework: An effective approach involves red teams attempting to produce secret loyalties while blue teams try to detect them, revealing vulnerable points in AI systems.
- Military Procurement Principles: Developing consensus within military communities around principles like law-following and distributed control could create safer AI procurement processes.

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CHAPTERS:
(00:00) About the Episode
(06:37) Introduction and Welcome
(06:50) AI Capabilities for Coups
(11:07) Concrete Coup Examples
(14:13) Historical Coup Comparisons
(18:39) Three Threat Categories (Part 1)
(18:44) Sponsor: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
(19:53) Three Threat Categories (Part 2)
(24:06) Sleeper Agents Explained
(29:12) Exclusive Access Risks (Part 1)
(33:13) Sponsor: Shopify
(35:09) Exclusive Access Risks (Part 2)
(39:14) Outgrowing the World
(48:18) Company Monopoly Scenarios
(55:03) Democracy vs Autocracy
(01:02:11) Mitigation Strategy Overview
(01:03:38) Developer Recommendations
(01:20:25) AI Takeover Interfaces
(01:30:07) Timeline and Capabilities
(01:37:45) Risk Indicators
(01:44:30) Ranking Coup Badness
(01:51:30) Global Implications
(01:55:04) What Listeners Do
(02:02:45) Outro

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