**TL;DR: **You (Yes You) should prepare for a “February 2020” moment where suddenly AI policy becomes the most important issue in the world. You should be ready to take action if and when it does, in a detailed way.
(*Epistemic status: *originally written for an event in early 2026; have heard from some folks that they found planning processes inspired by this memo very helpful for the smaller-scale OpenAI / Hugging Face response, so very quickly redacting a few things and posting this as-is.)
Many people in the AI policy space assume that eventually we’ll be at an Overton Window-shifting crisis moment, that opens the floodgates for the really good policies all along that we had.
But when you look at successful handling of crisis moments, there was no time to think – people applied strategies they’d learned via academic study or previous professional work, and then moved against them rapidly. For example, after 9/11, the US government operationalized past reports on intelligence and law enforcement reform and institutionalized them into law (good?) [1] and also picked an enemy to fight based on past history, Iraq (bad). Or in the 2008 financial crisis, Ben Bernanke brought deep academic experience studying financial panics and the Great Depression, partnered with Tim Geithner and Henry Paulson’s market and policy experience and deep networks. Or in 2020, Anthony Fauci essentially cashed in 30 years
I assert that the term “crisis” tends to include two different modes of American security policy
This memo means the latter.
Other folks propose great timeline uncertainty, and note the benefits of long timelines for getting it right. This community broadly, and perhaps you personally, Gentle Reader, should absolutely put bets behind longer timelines. I like longer timelines. Longer timelines have among other advantages, gaining approximately 8.3 billion person-years of human survival per additional year of wall-clock time, which sounds great. Those still probably end up in extraordinary mode, but you have plausibly more expected months of ordinary mode before you get there.
But I also think you should take very short timelines very seriously, and specifically build a plan against it. [3] Anthropic thinks we have ~2 to 3 years to ~AGI, and they sure do seem to mean it. And frankly, when I do my every ~3 months trip into the Bay Area, many people (including some reading this who
But when I ask those folks what their plan for extraordinary mode, for seizing that Overton-window-shifting moment when it comes, they don’t have a specific answer. It’s some combo of an off-the-cuff, “I don’t know, I guess fly to DC and try to talk to everyone I have relationships with there, try to advocate for good stuff.”
(This criticism also applies to me; I haven’t built this plan fully yet for my own job. Working on it now.)
There’s no fucking time to think when policymakers are in extraordinary mode.
Every AI org should have a detailed runbook, with specific tasks, updated twice a year, [4]against whatever you think your 1 to 3 most likely “AI has suddenly become the top issue in American life” crises are. (You’ll probably get this guess wrong, but an imperfect plan is better than no plan). This will probably change as American politics changes. You should have the ability to immediately just start executing on as much as possible if you think the crisis is a reasonable chance of hitting in some time in the next one to two years.
(Note the obvious risk: if you’re wrong, you’re really wrong, and you poison the well for the rest of us. I suspect, therefore, that you won’t be going to this checklist until after you ideally should have, because of these social pressures. So don’t worry about that too much.)
**Ideally, this checklist process should be iterative, and you should reason backwards from the checklist to identify gaps in your current efforts. **Specifically, you should ask yourself the question: “What do I really wish I had done by then, so that I’m ready?” In my example checklist below, you’ll note that it works best if you’ve spent time building relationships with key stakeholders, and their staffers, and their staffers’ staffers, so that the people who are in the White House Situation Room and the relevant Congressional committees make the right calls. Similarly, the hard work of policy still needs to be done, both in terms of preparing (and ideally, getting implemented) policy ideas in advance.
**Acknowledgements: **My thanks to my work colleagues, especially Jeffrey Ladish and Eli Tyre, for pushing my thinking on this. They don’t necessarily endorse any of this.
I recommend the book “Blinking Red,” by Michael Allen, in this regard: https://amzn.to/3NYKfLA Fauci had been in his leadership role at NIH – a civil service role, so no one could kick him out of it – so long that George Bush Senior praised him in the *1988 Presidential Campaign: *https://www.c-span.org/clip/public-affairs-event/user-clip-bush-mentions-fauci/4875658
My shoulder Eliezer and Nate say, “you just die,” and sure, that’s possible. But unfortunately, I’m the kind of stubborn where even if I think I’m gonna lose, I’ll fight.
Ideally more often, but I don’t think this is going to happen in real life until we internalize the idea that we can have our in-house LLM accounts read all of our emails and texts, identify things we should update, and update the run books dynamically.