80,000 Hours Podcast
The Geopolitics of AGI | Helen Toner (Director of CSET & Past OpenAI Board Member)
80,000 Hours Podcast
•November 5, 2025•2h 20m
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80,000 Hours Podcast•Nov 5, 2025
Why It Matters
The absence of U.S.–China AI dialogue hampers coordinated risk mitigation, while U.S. supercomputing deals with authoritarian regimes may inadvertently empower rivals and undermine democratic norms.
Key Takeaways
- •US-China AI talks are minimal, often suspended
- •No consensus on AGI definition or timeline
- •US leads AGI development; China lagging nine‑month gap
- •US grants supercomputing to UAE/Saudi, raising democratic concerns
- •Export controls limit Chinese access to high‑end compute
Pulse Analysis
The strategic silence between Washington and Beijing on artificial intelligence reflects a deeper mistrust that extends beyond commercial competition. While both nations recognize the transformative potential of AGI, they have yet to agree on a common definition or timeline, making any joint risk‑mitigation framework elusive. Recent diplomatic exchanges have been sporadic, often suspended, and used as bargaining chips in broader geopolitical negotiations. This communication vacuum not only stalls the development of international norms but also fuels a security dilemma where each side assumes the other will accelerate dangerous capabilities unchecked.
In the race toward AGI, the United States retains a measurable lead, currently estimated at a nine‑month advantage over China. American firms like OpenAI have rapidly iterated from o1 to o4, while Chinese startups such as DeepSeek lag behind, constrained by export controls that restrict access to cutting‑edge Nvidia GPUs. These controls, while intended to curb technology transfer, also limit China’s ability to close the compute gap, reinforcing the U.S. position at the forefront of large‑scale model training. The disparity underscores the importance of policy decisions that balance national security with the desire to maintain a competitive edge in AI research.
Complicating the geopolitical calculus, the U.S. has approved massive data‑center projects in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, deploying hundreds of thousands of next‑generation GPUs. Though framed as a democratic alternative to Chinese AI, these autocratic partners score poorly on freedom indices and maintain close ties with Beijing. Supplying world‑class compute to such regimes raises ethical concerns and may inadvertently strengthen authoritarian AI capabilities. Policymakers must weigh the short‑term strategic advantage of denying China market share against the long‑term risk of empowering regimes that could weaponize AI without democratic oversight.
Episode Description
With the US racing to develop AGI and superintelligence ahead of China, you might expect the two countries to be negotiating how they’ll deploy AI, including in the military, without coming to blows. But according to Helen Toner, director of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology in DC, “the US and Chinese governments are barely talking at all.”
Links to learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/ht25
In her role as a founder, and now leader, of DC’s top think tank focused on the geopolitical and military implications of AI, Helen has been closely tracking the US’s AI diplomacy since 2019.
“Over the last couple of years there have been some direct [US–China] talks on some small number of issues, but they’ve also often been completely suspended.” China knows the US wants to talk more, so “that becomes a bargaining chip for China to say, ‘We don’t want to talk to you. We’re not going to do these military-to-military talks about extremely sensitive, important issues, because we’re mad.'”
Helen isn’t sure the groundwork exists for productive dialogue in any case. “At the government level, [there’s] very little agreement” on what AGI is, whether it’s possible soon, whether it poses major risks. Without shared understanding of the problem, negotiating solutions is very difficult.
Another issue is that so far the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t seem especially “AGI-pilled.” While a few Chinese companies like DeepSeek are betting on scaling, she sees little evidence Chinese leadership shares Silicon Valley’s conviction that AGI will arrive any minute now, and export controls have made it very difficult for them to access compute to match US competitors.
When DeepSeek released R1 just three months after OpenAI’s o1, observers declared the US–China gap on AI had all but disappeared. But Helen notes OpenAI has since scaled to o3 and o4, with nothing to match on the Chinese side. “We’re now at something like a nine-month gap, and that might be longer.”
To find a properly AGI-pilled autocracy, we might need to look at nominal US allies. The US has approved massive data centres in the UAE and Saudi Arabia with “hundreds of thousands of next-generation Nvidia chips” — delivering colossal levels of computing power.
When OpenAI announced this deal with the UAE, they celebrated that it was “rooted in democratic values,” and would advance “democratic AI rails” and provide “a clear alternative to authoritarian versions of AI.”
But the UAE scores 18 out of 100 on Freedom House’s democracy index. “This is really not a country that respects rule of law,” Helen observes. Political parties are banned, elections are fake, dissidents are persecuted.
If AI access really determines future national power, handing world-class supercomputers to Gulf autocracies seems pretty questionable. The justification is typically that “if we don’t sell it, China will” — a transparently false claim, given severe Chinese production constraints. It also raises eyebrows that Gulf countries conduct joint military exercises with China and their rulers have “very tight personal and commercial relationships with Chinese political leaders and business leaders.”
In today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin and Helen discuss all that and more.
This episode was recorded on September 25, 2025.
CSET is hiring a frontier AI research fellow! https://80k.info/cset-role
Check out its careers page for current roles: https://cset.georgetown.edu/careers/
Chapters:
Cold open (00:00:00)
Who’s Helen Toner? (00:01:02)
Helen’s role on the OpenAI board, and what happened with Sam Altman (00:01:31)
The Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) (00:07:35)
CSET’s role in export controls against China (00:10:43)
Does it matter if the world uses US AI models? (00:21:24)
Is China actually racing to build AGI? (00:27:10)
Could China easily steal AI model weights from US companies? (00:38:14)
The next big thing is probably robotics (00:46:42)
Why is the Trump administration sabotaging the US high-tech sector? (00:48:17)
Are data centres in the UAE “good for democracy”? (00:51:31)
Will AI inevitably concentrate power? (01:06:20)
“Adaptation buffers” vs non-proliferation (01:28:16)
Will the military use AI for decision-making? (01:36:09)
“Alignment” is (usually) a terrible term (01:42:51)
Is Congress starting to take superintelligence seriously? (01:45:19)
AI progress isn't actually slowing down (01:47:44)
What's legit vs not about OpenAI’s restructure (01:55:28)
Is Helen unusually “normal”? (01:58:57)
How to keep up with rapid changes in AI and geopolitics (02:02:42)
What CSET can uniquely add to the DC policy world (02:05:51)
Talent bottlenecks in DC (02:13:26)
What evidence, if any, could settle how worried we should be about AI risk? (02:16:28)
Is CSET hiring? (02:18:22)
Video editing: Luke Monsour and Simon Monsour
Audio engineering: Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Music: CORBIT
Coordination, transcriptions, and web: Katy Moore
Show Notes
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