{"slug": "a-short-summary-of-ai-2040-plan-a", "title": "A short summary of AI 2040: Plan A", "summary": "The AI Futures Project authors propose Plan A, an international treaty to slow the AI race while advancing alignment research, arguing it is more stable than a full pause (Plan S). The summary highlights potential failure modes and notes the authors' preference for Plan A despite its downsides, as they believe Plan S would likely collapse into a dangerous race to superintelligence.", "body_md": "*This post will only make sense if you already know about AI 2040. If you don't, consider reading the authors' announcement post (**Substack**, **Less Wrong**), or reading **the full scenario**.*\n\n*Alternatively, if you want to read a longer unofficial summary of AI 2040: Plan A, consider reading **Scott Alexander’s introduction and reaction post** or **Zvi Mowshowitz’s introduction and reaction(s) post**.*\n\nI did not like [AI 2027](https://ai-2027.com/) and expected to feel similarly about [AI 2040: Plan A](https://ai-2040.com/). Having now read Plan A, I can safely say I was wrong: I vastly prefer it to AI 2027 and sincerely hope more people read it. However, Plan A is long and inaccessible to all except the most committed of readers, in large part because the authors decided not to include an executive summary.\n\n[The authors of AI 2040 explain:](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pFzctpJBat95SrCyC/ai-2040-plan-a)\n\nAs with AI 2027, summaries don’t really do it justice, since the whole point was to be detailed and comprehensive and work things out step by step rather than rely on high-level abstractions like doom or utopia.\n\nI disagree. I think many people will not read AI 2040, including some who probably should, precisely because it is so long and inaccessible. I also think those people would benefit from reading an [executive summary-style post describing it](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dHHuEYdbMqBf2deyj/using-the-executive-summary-style-writing-that-respects-your). This post is my attempt at writing that summary.\n\nThe AI Futures Project authors believe that the world should agree to an international AI-race slowdown treaty—basically just an arms control deal—that still advances research aimed at aligning and controlling AI. They call this Plan A.\n\nTheir argument is as follows:\n\nExecuted perfectly, Plan A looks something like this:\n\nThe authors are acutely aware of Plan A's many downsides. Below are seven potential roadblocks and failure modes.\n\nI plan to write another post focusing on the potential cruxes, points of disagreement, and strongest criticisms of Plan A. For example, I wish that they’d explained their robotics automation forecasts in more detail. I also wish they’d talked a bit more about what happens [if AI capabilities progress is slower than they anticipate](https://epochai.substack.com/p/the-case-for-multi-decade-ai-timelines), which would significantly affect the dynamics at play.\n\nBut overall, I think Plan A is excellent. No other plan comes close to being as comprehensive, and I’m confident that the authors’ work will be put to good use even if the plan falls through.\n\nWhy don't we just completely stop?The most pressing [danger] is that treaties can’t last forever - for example, the START treaties fell apart after thirty years. If Plan A met a similar fate, the race to superintelligence would begin again. Better for it to happen sooner under good conditions, than later during a chaotic race.\n\nThat being said, the authors are generally sympathetic to Plan S. [Excerpted from them](https://ai-2040.com/?choices=plan-s-root):\n\nwhether you prefer Plan A or Plan S might come down to how optimistic you are about the future of a US-China deal, and your assessment of technical alignment and control difficulty:\n\nYou should prefer Plan S insofar as you think the deal is stable and insofar as you think that scaling to more capable AIs early in the deal doesn’t help much with safety or poses risks outweighing its helpfulness...You should prefer Plan A if you think the deal is unstable and that scaling to more capable AIs early in the deal is helpful and safe.\n\nWe are uncertain, but overall think that a well-implemented version of Plan A is probably going to work to avoid loss of control and concentration of power risks, whereas we think that even a well-implemented version of Plan S would plausibly collapse within a decade or so into another dangerous race to ASI.\n\nDo note that their preferred versions of Plan S strongly resembles Plan A:\n\nThe best versions of Plan S are those that acknowledge that the deal will eventually end, and simply say “First (step 1) we should stop making frontier AIs more capable, because the AIs and AI companies are getting more powerful every day and there’s so much uncertainty about where it’s headed and how fast. Then (step 2) once the world has had several years to think about things and plan a safe and broadly beneficial path forward, we can resume.”\n\nWhile Plan A strictly applies to the whole world, the specific scenario primarily revolves around the U.S. and China, the two leading players in AI. Specifically, Plan A assumes that the U.S. is acting optimally in the best interests of itself and the world, while China is acting as it actually would in real life. This is not a safe assumption for a purely probabilistic forecast, but Plan A is more of a positive vision/wish list anyway.\n\nIn their own words:\n\nWe’ll agree to let each other see all the AI research. Then, if we don’t like something someone is doing, we’ll talk about it and perhaps agree to ban it.\n\nThat being said, Total Research Transparency is more restrictive than full open sourcing, as it does not require model weights to be open ([and actively advises against it](https://ai-2040.com/?choices=plan-a-root#why-this-much-transparency-why-not-less-or-more-open-access-in-plan-a)):\n\nThe main way that Plan A could be even more open is by allowing or requiring open model weights for frontier models. However, we recommend against publicly releasing frontier model weights. The main reasons for this are:\n\n- Open weight models can be used by covert projects to attempt an intelligence explosion; once covert projects have sufficiently capable models, the intelligence explosion probably goes very quickly (for example, under the AI 2040 default capability trajectory, there are only 2 months between TED AI and ASI).\n- Closed weight models can have refusal safeguards trained into them, while it is trivial to remove safeguards from open weight models. This is important both for limiting countries' AI capabilities and for limiting misuse. For example, terrorists and other actors might be able to use highly capable open weight models to design world-ending bioweapons (e.g., develop mirror life). Bioweapons are very offense dominant. In this scenario, we recommend substantial defense against bioweapons, but prevention is a strongly preferable line of defense to mitigation.\n\nMutually Assured Compute Destruction is necessary to punish defection and/or roll back capabilities if something goes horribly wrong. From AI 2040:\n\nThe US and China agree on the importance of ensuring that the compute is destroyed in the case of deal dissolution. To accomplish this, they agree to build the datacenters in the third-party countries least secure against their rival’s military intervention: China’s new datacenters will be in Canada, and America’s in Mongolia, with both hosts compensated via monetary payments, jobs, and a share in the new AI economy. If the deal dissolves, they reason, America and Canada will immediately move to take control of China’s datacenters in Canada, and China will self-destruct their compute rather than let it fall into American hands (and vice versa). Thus the idea of “Mutually Assured Compute Destruction” is born.\n\nFor more on how a Citizen's Dividend might work, consider The Windfall Clause ([short talk](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/cullen-okeefe-the-windfall-clause-sharing-the-benefits-of-advanced-ai), [long paper](https://www.governance.ai/research-paper/the-windfall-clause-distributing-the-benefits-of-ai-for-the-common-good)).\n\nThis is by far the most speculative and exotic part of the scenario: the authors confine it to [an epilogue section](https://ai-2040.com/?choices=plan-a-root#playbook-epilogue). I'm not terribly interested in it, largely because I think it’s far too early to predict this kind of thing, so I won't get into it here.\n\nThe authors expect America to maintain its current AI capabilities lead, leaving the rest of the world scrambling to accept a mutually beneficial deal. [Quoting them](https://ai-2040.com/?choices=plan-a-root#why-would-china-be-interested-in-a-deal-why-would-anyone):\n\nIn short, the answer is that anyone concerned about loss of control should think Plan A is an improvement, along with anyone concerned about concentration of power—except for the people in whom the power would concentrate by default.\n\nChina...is an example of an actor in whom power would\n\nnotconcentrate by default. In 2029 in this scenario, the US has a significant lead in AI capabilities over China and a significant advantage in compute which will compound the lead. The more powerful AI gets, the scarier it will be to fall behind, as[AI 2027]and the later years in this scenario illustrate.\n\nIt would thus be harder to establish a treaty if America lost its capabilities lead.\n\nAnother concern they mention is the risk of *America* not agreeing to Plan A:\n\nFor these reasons, we expect strong opposition to Plan A from the leading AI companies. We expect them to rationalize arguments for why the deal is bad and why instead what’s best for America and humanity is a different strategy that just so happens to allow them to continue accumulating massive amounts of power.\n\nHowever, because Plan A implicitly assumes that the U.S. is acting optimally in the best interests of itself and the world, the authors do not discuss this concern further.\n\nI think this is a fair choice to make—it’s hard to write a positive vision for the future if you can’t assume that *someone* is going to make the right decisions—but for those of us in the real world, it does add an extra barrier to implementation (”even if I think Plan A sounds fine, how would we get and sustain the political will required to make all these drastic changes?”)\n\nI keep repeating this phrase for a reason; if we had viable plans that did better than the status quo on any of these metrics, I'd link to them, and presumably the AIFP authors would too. But I'm unaware of any such plans, and so I have nothing to compare Plan A to.\n\nFrom [Scott Alexander's response post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/introducing-plan-a):\n\nThis is a crazy thing to try releasing. Daniel gave me several justifications for doing it anyway, but the one I remember most is that it’s supposed to be a floor. When some politician proposes a data center ban, or says that we have to gut safety regulation to compete with China, or promises a job retraining program, think to yourself: does this person have a vision for where all of this ends up? If so, is it as good as Plan A? If not, consider demanding that they do better.\n\nIn the [Plan A Assumptions supplement](https://ai-2040.com/supplements/plan-a-assumptions#massive-datacenter-buildout), author Thomas Larsen argues that the main downsides of building out data centers are:\n\nHe concludes that building out data centers is a good idea if and only if:\n\nIf any of those three premises are false, the argument becomes invalid.\n\nFor more on these concerns, particularly regarding the feasibility of Mutually Assured Compute Destruction, consider reading [Plan A's problem with dry tinder](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8iDZnQwmvwuxZo3Wx/plan-a-s-problem-with-dry-tinder) by Tom Davidson.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-short-summary-of-ai-2040-plan-a", "canonical_source": "https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mWp3KBRpYagWMrGqa/a-short-summary-of-ai-2040-plan-a", "published_at": "2026-07-13 23:07:30+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-13 23:21:21.170918+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-policy", "ai-safety", "ai-research"], "entities": ["AI Futures Project", "Scott Alexander", "Zvi Mowshowitz", "Less Wrong", "Substack", "Epoch AI"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-short-summary-of-ai-2040-plan-a", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-short-summary-of-ai-2040-plan-a.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-short-summary-of-ai-2040-plan-a.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-short-summary-of-ai-2040-plan-a.jsonld"}}