Artificial general intelligence — an A.I. system that can beat humans at almost any cognitive task — is arriving in just a couple of years. That’s what people tell me — people who work in A.I. labs, researchers who follow their work, former White House officials. A lot of these people have been calling me over the last couple of months trying to convey the urgency. This is coming during President Trump’s term, they tell me. We’re not ready.One of the people who reached out to me was Ben Buchanan, the top adviser on A.I. in the Biden White House. And I thought it would be interesting to have him on the show for a couple reasons: He’s not connected to an A.I. lab, and he was at the nerve center of policymaking on A.I. for years. So what does he see coming? What keeps him up at night? And what does he think the Trump administration needs to do to get ready for the AGI — or something like AGI — he believes is right on the horizon?This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:“Machines of Loving Grace” by Dario Amodei“Ninety-five theses on AI” by Samuel Hammond“What It Means to be Kind in a Cruel World” by The Ezra Klein Show with George SaundersBook recommendations:The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas KuhnRise of the Machines by Thomas RidA Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George SaundersThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Switch and Board Podcast Studio. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is the urgency around AGI development?
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. For the past couple of months, I've been having this strange experience where person after person, independent of each other from AI labs, from government has been coming to me and saying, it's really about to happen. We're really about to get to artificial general intelligence. And
What they mean is that they have believed for a long time that we are on a path to creating transformational artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence capable of doing basically anything a human being can do behind a computer, but better than most human beings can do it. And before they thought, you know, maybe take five or 10 years, 10 or 15 years.
But now they believe it's coming inside of two to three years inside Donald Trump's second term. And they believe it because of the products they're releasing right now. They believe because of what they're seeing inside the places they work. And I think they're right. If you've been telling yourself this isn't coming, I really think you need to question that. It's not Web3. It's not Vaporware.
A lot of what we're talking about is already here right now. And I think we are on the cusp of an era in human history that is unlike any of the eras we have had before. And we're not prepared in part because it's not clear what it would mean to prepare. We don't know what this will look like, what it will feel like. We don't know how labor markets will respond.
We don't know which country is going to get there first. We don't know what it will mean for war. We don't know what it'll mean for peace. And as much as there is so much else going on in the world to cover, I do think there's a good chance that when we look back on this era in human history, this will have been the thing that matters.
This will have been the event horizon, the thing that the world before it and the world after it were just different worlds. One of the people who reached out to me is Ben Buchanan, who was the former special advisor for artificial intelligence in the Biden White House. And I thought it'd kind of be interesting to bring on for a couple of reasons.
One is that this is not a guy working for an AI lab. So he's not being paid by the big AI labs to tell you this technology is coming. The second is that he was at the nerve center of what policy we have been making in recent years. And we have been doing things. And in particular, we've been doing things to try to stay ahead of China.
And he's been at the center of that working on the national security side. And three, because there's now been a profound changeover in administrations. And the new administration between Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and David Sachs and JD Vance has a lot of people with very, very, very strong views on AI. It's not something that they're going in without having thought about.
So we're at this moment of a big transition in the policymakers, and they are probably going to be in power when a GEI or something like it hits the world. So what are they going to do? What kinds of decisions are going to need to be made?
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Chapter 2: Why is the U.S. government concerned about AI advancements?
And what kinds of thinking do we need to start doing now to be prepared for something that virtually everybody who works in this area is trying to tell us as loudly as they possibly can is coming. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Ben Buchanan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
So you gave me a call after the end of the Biden administration, and I got a call from a lot of people in the Biden administration who wanted to tell me about all the great work they did. And you sort of seemed to want to warn people about what you now thought was coming. What's coming?
I think we are going to see extraordinarily capable AI systems. I don't love the term artificial general intelligence, but I think that will fit in the next couple of years, quite likely during Donald Trump's presidency. And I think there's a view that this has always been something of corporate hype or speculation.
And I think one of the things I saw in the White House when I was decidedly not in a corporate position was trend lines that looked very clear. And what we tried to do under the president's leadership was get the U.S. government and our society ready for these systems.
Before we get into what it would mean to get ready... What does it mean? Yeah. When you say extraordinarily capable systems, capable of what?
The sort of canonical definition of AGI, which again is a term I don't love, is a system... It'll be good if every time you say AGI, you caveat that you dislike the term. It'll sink in, right?
Yeah, people really enjoy that.
I'm trying to get it in the training data. A canonical definition of AGI is a system capable of doing almost any cognitive task a human can do.
I don't know that we'll quite see that in the next four years or so, but I do think we'll see something like that, where the breadth of the system is remarkable, but also its depth, its capacity to, in some cases, exceed human capabilities, kind of regardless of the cognitive discipline. Systems that can replace human beings in cognitively demanding jobs.
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Chapter 3: How would AGI impact national security and global dominance?
Aaron remembers it because he's saying we're going to the moon, but actually I think he gives the better line when he talks about the importance of space.
For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man. And only if the United States... occupies a position of preeminence, can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war?
And I think that is true in AI, that there's a lot of tremendous uncertainty about this technology. I am not an AI evangelist. I think there's huge risks to this technology. But I do think there is a fundamental role for the United States in being able to shape where it goes. Which is not to say we don't want to work internationally, which is not to say we don't want to work with the Chinese.
It's worth noting that in the president's executive order on AI, there's a line in there saying we are willing to work even with our competitors on AI safety and the like. But it is worth saying that I think pretty deeply there is a fundamental role for America here that we cannot abdicate.
Paint the picture for me. You say there'd be great economic, national security, military risks if China got there first. Help me help the audience here imagine a world where China gets there first.
So I think let's look at just a narrow case of AI for intelligence analysis and cyber operations. This is, I think, pretty out in the open that if you had a much more powerful AI capability, that would probably enable you to do better cyber operations on offense and on defense. What is a cyber operation?
Breaking into an adversary's network to collect information, which if you're collecting a large enough volume, AI systems can help you analyze. And we actually did a whole big thing through DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, called the AI Cyber Challenge, to test out AI's capabilities to do this.
And I would not want to live in a world in which China has that capability on offense and defense and cyber, and the United States does not. And I think that is true in a bunch of different domains that are core to national security competition.
My sense already has been that most people, most institutions are pretty hackable to a capable state actor. Not everything, but a lot of them. And now both the state actors are going to get better at hacking, and they're going to have much more capacity to do it in the sense that you can have many more AI hackers than you can human hackers.
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Chapter 4: What are the cybersecurity implications of advanced AI?
national security-relevant technology, maybe world-changing technology that's not coming from the auspices of the government and doesn't have the kind of government imprimatur of security requirements. That shows up in this way as well. We, in the National Security Memorandum, the president's side, tried to signal this to the labs and tried to say to them, we are, as the U.S.
government, want to help you in this mission. This was signed in October of 2024, so there wasn't a ton of time for us to build on that. But I think it's a priority for the Trump administration. And I can't imagine anything that is more nonpartisan than protecting American companies that are inventing the future.
There's a dimension of this that I find people bring up to me a lot, and it's interesting, is that processing of information. So compared to spy games between the Soviet Union and the United States, we all just have a lot more information. We have all the satellite data.
We, I mean, obviously we will not eavesdrop on each other, but obviously we eavesdrop on each other and have all these kinds of things coming in. And I'm told by people who know this better than I do, that there's just a huge choke point of human beings. And they're currently fairly rudimentary programs analyzing that data.
And that there's a view that what it would mean to have these truly intelligent systems that are able to inhale that and do pattern recognition is a much more significant change in the balance of power than people outside this understand.
Yeah, I think we were pretty public about this. And the president signed a national security memorandum, which is basically the national security equivalent of an executive order that says this is a fundamental area of importance for the United States. I don't even know the amount of satellite images that the United States collects every single day, but it's a huge amount.
And we have been public about the fact that we simply do not have enough humans to go through all of this satellite imagery, and it would be a terrible job if we did. And there is a role for AI in going through these images of hotspots around the world, of shipping lines and all that, and analyzing them in an automated way and surfacing the most interesting and important ones for human review.
And I think at one level, you can look at this and say, well, doesn't software just do that? And I think that at some level, of course, is true. At another level, you could say the more capable that software, the more capable the automation of that analysis, the more intelligent advantage you extract from that data. And that ultimately leads to a better position for the United States.
I think the first and second order consequences of that are also striking. One thing it implies is that in a world where you have strong AI, the incentive for spying goes up. Because if right now we are choked at the point of we are collecting more data than we can analyze, well, then each marginal piece of data we're collecting isn't that valuable.
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Chapter 5: What are the political tensions between the U.S. and China regarding AI?
The plain reading of the facts is that not selling chips to them I don't think is a declaration of war.
But I don't think they do misunderstand us. I mean, maybe they see it differently, but I think you're being a little—look, I'm aware of how— politics in Washington works. I've talked to many people doing this. I've seen the turn towards a much more confrontational posture with China. I know that Jake Sullivan and President Biden wanted to call this strategic competition and not a new Cold War.
And I get all that. I think it's true. And also, we have just talked about, and you did not argue the point, that our dominant view is we need to get to this technology before they do. I don't think they look at this like, oh, you know, like nobody would ever sell us a top technology. I think they understand what we're doing here.
To some degree. I don't want to trigger this. I'm sure they do see it that way. On the other hand, we set up an AI dialogue with them. And, you know, I flew to Geneva and met them. And we tried to talk to them about AI safety and the like. So I do think in an area as complex as AI, you can have multiple things be true at the same time. I don't regret for a second the export controls.
And I think... Frankly, we are proud to have done them when we did them because it has helped ensure that here we are a couple of years later, we retain the edge in AI for as good as our talent as DeepSeek is.
Well, you say that. What made DeepSeek such a shock, I think, to the American system was here is a system that appeared to be trained on much less compute for much less money that was competitive at a high level with our frontier systems. How did you understand what DeepSeek was and and what assumptions it required that we rethink or don't.
Yeah, let's just take one step back so we're tracking the history of DeepSeq here. So we'd been watching DeepSeq in the White House since November of 23, or thereabouts, when they put out their first coding system. And there's no doubt that the DeepSeq engineers are extremely talented. And they got better and better at their systems throughout 2024.
We were heartened when their CEO said, I think that the biggest impediment to what DeepSeek was doing was not their inability to get money or talent, but their inability to get advanced chips. Clearly, they still did get some chips that they some they bought legally, some they smuggled. So it seems.
And then in December of 24, they came out with a system called version three DeepSeek version three, which actually I think is one that should have gotten the attention. It didn't get a ton of attention, but it did show they were making strong algorithmic progress and basically making systems more efficient. And then in January of 25, they came out with a system called R1.
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Chapter 6: How are AI safety and competition being debated in Washington?
So I think he is setting up a dichotomy there that I don't quite agree with. And the irony of that is, if you look at the rest of his speech, which I did watch, there's actually a lot that I do agree with. So he talks, for example, I think he's got four pillars in the speech. One's about centering the importance of workers.
One's about American preeminence and like, those are entirely consistent with the actions that we took and the philosophy that I think the administration, which I was a part espoused, and I certainly believe. Insofar as what he is saying is that safety and opportunity are in fundamental tension, then I disagree.
And I think if you look at the history of technology and technology adaptation, the evidence is pretty clear that the right amount of safety action unleashes opportunity and, in fact, unleashes speed. So one of the examples that we studied a lot and talked to the president about was the early days of railroads.
And in the early days of railroads, there were tons of accidents and crashes and deaths. And people were not inclined to use railroads as a result. And then what started happening was safety standards and safety technology. Block signaling, so that trains could know when they were in the same area. Air brakes, so that trains could brake more efficiently.
standardization of train track widths and gauges and the like. And this was not always popular at the time. But with the benefit of hindsight, it is very clear that that kind of technology and to some degree policy development of safety standards made the American railroad system in the late 1800s. And I think this is a pattern that shows up a bunch throughout the history of technology.
To be very clear, it is not the case that every safety regulation, every technology is good. And there certainly are cases where you can overreach and you can slow things down and choke things off. But I don't think it's true. There's a fundamental tension between safety and opportunity.
That's interesting because I don't know how to get this point of regulation right. I think the counter argument to Vice President Vance is nuclear. Mm-hmm. So nuclear power is a technology that both held extraordinary promise, maybe still does, and also you can really imagine every country wanting to be in the lead on.
But the series of accidents, which most of them did not even have a particularly significant body count, were so frightening to people. Yeah. The technology got regulated to the point that certainly all of nuclear's advocates believe it has been largely strangled in the crib from what it could be.
The question then is, when you look at the actions we have taken on AI, are we strangling in the crib and have we taken actions that are akin to... I'm not saying that we've already done it.
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Chapter 7: What are the potential impacts of AI on democracy and surveillance?
But I think when the rubber meets the road, we were comfortable with the notion that you could both realize the opportunity of AI while doing it safely. And now that they are in power, they will have to decide how do they translate Vice President Vance's rhetoric into a governing policy.
And my understanding of their executive order is they've given themselves six months to figure out what they're going to do. And I think we should judge them on what they do.
Let me ask about the other side of this, because what I liked about Vance's speech is I think he's right that we don't talk enough about opportunities. But more than that, we are not preparing for opportunities. So if you imagine that AI will have the effects and possibilities that its backers and advocates hope...
One thing that that implies is that we're going to start having a much faster pace of the discovery or proposal of novel drug molecules, a very high promise. The idea here from people I've spoken to is that AI should be able to ingest an amount of information and build sort of modeling of diseases in the human body that could get us a much, much, much better drug discovery pipeline.
If that were true, then you can ask this question, well, what's the choke point going to be? And our drug testing pipeline is incredibly cumbersome. It's very hard to get the animals you need for trials, very hard to get the human beings you need for trials, right? You can do a lot to make that faster, to prepare it for a lot more coming in. You could think about human challenge trials, right?
There are all kinds of things like this. And this is true everywhere. in a lot of different domains, right? Education, et cetera. I think it's pretty clear that the choke points will become the difficulty of doing things in the real world. And I don't see society also preparing for that, right?
We're not doing that much on the safety side, maybe because we don't know what we should do, but also on the opportunity side, this question of how could you actually make it possible to translate the benefits of this stuff very fast seems like a much richer conversation than I've seen anybody seriously having.
Yeah, I think I basically agree with all of that. I think the conversation when we were in the government, especially in 23 and 24, was starting to happen. We looked at the clinical trials thing. You've read about healthcare for however long. I don't claim expertise on healthcare, but it does seem to me that...
We want to get to a world where we can take the breakthroughs, including breakthroughs from AI systems, and translate them to market much faster. This is not a hypothetical thing.
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Chapter 8: What is the role of big tech companies in AI development?
It is too slow to radically change the way things are done and take advantage of things that can be productivity enhancing.
I couldn't agree more. I mean, the existence of my job in the White House, the White House Special Advisor for AI, which David Sachs now is, and I had this job in 2023, existed because President Biden said very clearly, publicly and privately, we cannot move at the typical government pace. We have to move faster here. I think we probably need to be careful.
And I'm not here for stripping it all down, but I agree with you. We have to move much faster.
So another major part of Vice President Vance's speech was signaling to the Europeans that that we are not going to sign on to complex multilateral negotiations and regulations that could slow us down, and that if they passed such regulations anyway, in a way that we believe is penalizing our AI companies, we would retaliate.
How do you think about the differing position the new administration is moving into vis-a-vis Europe and its approach, its broad approach to tech regulation?
Yeah, I think the honest answer here is we had conversations with Europe as they were drafting the EU AI Act. But at the time that I was in, the EU AI Act was still kind of nascent and the act had passed. But a lot of the actual details of it had been kicked to a process that my sense is still unfolding. So speaking of slow moving. Yeah, I mean, bureaucracies. Exactly. Exactly.
So I guess I didn't have from maybe this is a failing on my part. I did not have particularly detailed conversations with the Europeans beyond a general kind of articulation of our views. They were respectful. We were respectful. But I think it's fair to say we were taking a different approach than they were taking.
And we were probably, insofar as safety and opportunity are a dichotomy, which I don't think they are a pure dichotomy, we were ready to move very fast in the development of AI.
One of the other things that Vance talked about and that you said you agreed with is making AI pro-worker. What does that mean?
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