Demonstrating Restraint

TL;DR

The paper investigates how the United States could credibly commit to restraint in the face of powerful AI, aiming to deter preventive war without sacrificing strategic advantage. It develops a dual framework of costly signaling and foreclosure guarantees to establish credibility, and argues that a layered mix of diplomacy, system-level interventions, and institutional design can enhance commitment under uncertainty. Where signals may falter due to power or type shifts, converging mechanisms like escrow, active shields, and automatic degradation offer concrete, though speculative, options to constrain actions. The work highlights significant practical and technical hurdles—verification, governance, and adversarial robustness—while outlining directions for future research to assess feasibility and optimize the balance of risks and benefits in a rapidly evolving AI security landscape.

Abstract

Some have claimed that the future development of powerful AI systems would enable the United States to shift the international balance of power dramatically in its favor. Such a feat may not be technically possible; even so, if American AI development is perceived as a sufficiently severe threat by its nation-state adversaries, then the risk that they take extreme preventive action against the United States may rise. To bolster its security against preventive action, the United States could aim to pursue a strategy of restraint by demonstrating that it would not use powerful AI to threaten the survival of other nations. Drawing from the international relations literature that explores how states can make credible commitments, we sketch a set of options that the United States could employ to implement this strategy. In the most challenging setting, where it is certain that the US will unilaterally obtain powerful new capabilities, it is difficult to credibly commit to restraint, though an approach that layers significant policy effort with technical breakthroughs may make credibility achievable. If an adversary has realistic levels of uncertainty about the capabilities and intentions of the United States, a strategy of restraint becomes more feasible. Though restraint faces difficulties, it deserves to be weighed against alternative strategies that have been proposed for avoiding conflict during the transition to a world with advanced AI.