All it takes to hurl our world into an economic depression that will bankrupt millions of us and stall progress in every sector for a decade is a reckless move from a powerful head of state. As I write this, the pre-market NASDAQ is down almost 6% from its Friday closing. It has lost about 20% of its value since Trump announced his reciprocal tariff policy.
Now imagine some megalomaniac political leader of a country that has unilaterally achieved AGI, ANDSI or ASI. Immediately he ramps up AI research to create the most powerful offensive weapons system our world has ever known, and unleashes an ill-conceived plan to rule the entire world.
Moving to the corporate risk, imagine one company reaching AGI, ANDSI, or ASI, months before its competitors catch up. Do you truly believe that this company would release an anonymous version on the Chatbot Arena? Do you truly believe that this company would even announce the model or launch it in preview mode? The company would most probably build a stock trading agent that would within weeks corner all of the world's financial markets. Within a month the company's market capitalization would soar from a few billion dollars to a few trillion dollars. Game over for every other company in the world in every conceivable market sector.
OpenAI initially committed to being a not-for-profit research company vowing to open source models and serve humanity. It is now in the process of transitioning to a for-profit company valued at $300 billion, with no plan to open source any of their top models. I mention OpenAI because at 500 million weekly users, it has far beyond all other AI developers gained the public trust. But what happened to its central mission to serve humanity? 13,000 children under the age of five die every single day of a poverty that our world could easily and if we wanted to do. When have you heard about OpenAI making a single investment in this area, while investing $500 billion in a data center. I mention OpenAI because if we cannot trust our most trusted AI developer to keep its word, what can we safely expect from other developers?
Now imagine Elon Musk reaching AGI, ANDSI or ASI first. Think back to his recent DOGE initiative where he advocated ending Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare just as a beginning. Think back to the tens of thousands of federal workers whom he has already fired, as he brags about it on stage, waving a power chainsaw in the air. Imagine his companies cornering the world financial markets, and increasing their value to over 10 trillion dollars.
The point here is that because there are many other people like Trump and Musk in the world, either one single country or one single corporation reaching AGI, ANDSI or ASI weeks or months before the others poses the kind of threat to human civilization that we probably want to spare ourselves the pain of understanding too clearly and the fear of facing too squarely.
There is a way to prudently neutralize these above threats, but only one such way. Just like the nations of the world committed to a nuclear deterrent policy that has kept us safe from nuclear war for the last 80 years, today's nations must forge a collaborative effort to, together, build and share the AGI, ANDSI and ASI that will rule tomorrow's world.
A very important part of this effort would be to ramp up the open source AI movement so that it dominates the space. The reason for this could not be more clear. As a country, company or not-for-profit organization moves toward achieving AGI, ANDSI or ASI, the open source nature of the project would mean that everyone would be aware of this progress. Perhaps just as importantly, there are unknown unknowns to this initiative. Open sourcing it would mean that millions of eyes would be constantly overseeing the project, rather than merely hundreds, or thousands, or even tens of thousands were the project overseeing by a single company or nation.
The risks now stand before us, and so do the strategies for mitigating these risks. Let's create a United Nations initiative whereby all nations would share progress toward ASI, and let's open source the work so that it can be properly monitored.