On using crises to shift political will for AI

Significant AI policy change will likely follow major AI safety incidents, and advocates for amplifying such incidents to build political will for preferred regulations. It draws parallels to the IAEA and NPT establishment after nuclear crises, rapid COVID-19 measures, and the thalidomide scandal's impact on drug safety laws, noting that felt crises drive policy action.

TL;DR: We’ll probably be getting more AI safety incidents, so amplify the ones that would justify or highlight the urgency of your preferred policy solutions even from a non-technical skeptic concerned with national security’s perspective, as these will be far more effective than anything else. Strong policy change happens most effectively when the attributed problem is felt enough to warrant the perceived costs of the proposed solution. Many relevant precedents to AI governance can be viewed through this lens: - What led to the rapid establishment of the IAEA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International Atomic Energy Agency and NPT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons , in spite of the costs endured by doing so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAEA safeguards ? It’s because the effects of nuclear war and threat of mutually assured destruction had just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold War 1953%E2%80%931962 felt by everyone, so they had better make sure it never happens again. - How did we enact such strong enforcement measures for mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic so rapidly? It’s because decisionmakers felt the rapid spread, the climbing death toll, the general feeling of uncertainty surrounding how bad it was going to be, and the established experts sounding the alarm on what ought to be done, enough to warrant using their authority to invoke emergency measures taken. Why did we underprioritize stronger pandemic prevention https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pvEuEN6eMZC2hqG9c/humanity-learned-almost-nothing-from-covid-19 and even roll-back some pandemic response measures afterward? It’s because people https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/b6HYxnxAhLeWHGCgG/covid-skepticism-isn-t-about-science felt the negative impacts of the lockdown mandates far more https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/b6HYxnxAhLeWHGCgG/covid-skepticism-isn-t-about-science than the pandemic itself or the impacts counterfactually not experienced as a result, leaving many people overcorrecting towards general opposition to pandemic-response measures. Why is there still no law mandating nucleic acid screening https://quintic.substack.com/p/why-arent-we-mandating-nucleic-acid , so as to ensure someone trying to order a virus from a nucleic acid synthesis company would be caught and stopped before they could do so? Seriously, this is essentially unanimously supported, has had advocacy for decades, including by the industry themselves and especially recently https://screendna.org/ , and yet the bill that could solve this has been waiting in committee without markups for just over 7 months now after being introduced. It’s because Congress is slow by design, devoting time to a particular bill or issue costs time spent on others, and plenty of other bills feel like more of a priority. There have been no recent attempts by bioterrorists to use this to their advantage, after all.- Why did the thalidomide crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide scandal prompt the safety and efficacy requirements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kefauver%E2%80%93Harris Amendment on the development of new drugs? And why do these persist in spite of slowing down drug development far more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism of the Food and Drug Administration Charges of over-regulation than what would have been sufficient to prevent the thalidomide crisis? It’s because the thalidomide crisis was felt by everyone from the scandal it produced, and you never feel the downside of medicine that could have helped you counterfactually not being available earlier. At least, not in such a way that leads you to attribute it to the drug approval process needing reformed. - Where has the environmentalist movement succeeded, in spite of its worst risks, like AI, also being hypothetical long-term events never felt? Especially in spite of the group that reaps the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The Logic of Collective Action concentrated benefits from not complying with regulation investing far more resources to influence political outcomes in their favor than the general public who only experiences its diffuse costs ? It’s where people saw and felt its near-term consequences the most: the Great Smog of London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great Smog of London prompting the UK’s Clean Air Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean Air Act 1956 , the Cuyahoga River fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga River Environmental cleanup prompting the expansion of the Clean Water Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean Water Act and accelerating the creation of the EPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United States Environmental Protection Agency , Love Canal’s contamination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love Canal and resulting adverse health effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love Canal Health effects prompting Superfund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund , etc. - Well then how come the Montreal Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal Protocol succeeded? They started reversing the depletion of the ozone layer well before its adverse effects were felt by many people, and it suffered from the concentrated benefits versus diffuse costs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public choice interests problem, and it’s a binding international agreement which is much more difficult to establish, so it’s unusually difficult for many of the same reasons a binding international AI treaty would be It’s partially because advocates leaned into https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/05/us/us-report-predicts-rise-in-skin-cancer-with-loss-of-ozone.html the more immediate “the ozone hole causes cancer” messaging than “the ozone hole will gradually make the Earth less habitable”, partially because environmentalism was already a much larger political movement due to other factors, but in this case it was actually primarily because the most active lobbyist group found harmless alternatives https://rapidtransition.org/stories/back-from-the-brink-how-the-world-rapidly-sealed-a-deal-to-save-the-ozone-layer/ to the substances depleting the ozone layer that weren’t particularly costly to switch to. - Why did the perceived jailbreak https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/13/inside-the-whirlwind-24-hours-that-led-the-white-house-to-slap-export-controls-on-anthropic-00961519 to access Mythos’ advanced cyber capabilities prompt its export controls https://thezvi.substack.com/p/american-government-takes-down-claude ? Because the government had already felt its capabilities from the reports surrounding it https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing , and wanted to be especially cautious to prevent foreign actors taking advantage of it. - Why did the OpenAI HuggingFace security incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026 OpenAI agent cyberattacks lead Trump to tell reporters the White House was looking at ways to balance controls for AI with not coming second to China https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTWO1DU-3ZA ? Why did several members of Congress use this event and related reports https://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cybersecurity-evals to point to the need for mandated transparency? Because the news coverage https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2el319vzr3o , Sam Altman https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/openais-sam-altman-discuss-voluntary-ai-safety-tests-with-trump-officials-after-2026-07-30/ , and over a thousand frontier AI lab employees https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/ helped them feel the seriousness of the event. - Why has the White House otherwise been so averse to AI regulation, citing the need to beat China in the AI race? Because that’s what all the loudest voices have been telling them https://images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-Weights-and-American-AI-Leadership.pdf and because this administration tends to be more skeptical of economic regulation in general, which could be a good heuristic under normal circumstances https://blog.aifutures.org/p/ai-as-profoundly-abnormal-technology . - Why does the general public seem far more concerned by data centers https://blog.andymasley.com/p/ai-and-the-environment ? Because regardless of how much they use AI themselves, or indirectly benefit from companies whose products they buy using it, they only feel the giant ugly buildings being built nearby, and they hear that it’s using up all their water https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake . One AI company’s agent hacking another AI company sounds like their problem. - Had the victim of the HuggingFace incident instead been any of the vast majority of institutions that would have sued OpenAI in response, prompting the heavy news coverage and legal ruling that would have followed? Had it been a government agency? An airport? A hospital? Any other piece of digital infrastructure frequently used by a large portion of the general public and viewed as important? Had it tangibly inconvenienced the people who used the service, even if only in some minor way? Had they really felt it? Raising transparency, incident reporting, control, and liability standards for AI labs would be the least of the resulting demands made. This, the several https://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cybersecurity-evals similar https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/incident-report-unsanctioned-agent-behaviour-during-cyber-testing reports https://www.npr.org/2026/08/08/nx-s1-5924878/meta-ai-breaches-external-firm-during-security-testing-sandbox-error that shortly followed, and the fact that OpenAI has already continued development https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k3eKqKzq4Y7xnqEfZ/openai-has-already-ended-an-internal-pause suggests we’ll likely be getting more incidents of this kind. They’re making it easy for us; all we have to do is not drop the ball . But as “ The current bottleneck is political will, not research https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EexsebbYhbe2gXkPP/the-current-bottleneck-is-political-will-not-research ” recently illustrated which I strongly urge you to read if you haven’t already , the ball is being dropped nowhere harder than here. Discuss https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wbEcn5HTtvH4TsDN4/on-using-crises-to-shift-political-will-for-ai comments