Nuclear Espionage and AI Governance - LessWrong

Using both primary and secondary sources, I discuss the role of espionage in early nuclear history. Nuclear weapons are analogous to AI in many ways, so this period may hold lessons for AI governance. Nuclear spies successfully transferred information about the plutonium implosion bomb design and the enrichment of fissile material. Spies were mostly ideologically motivated. Counterintelligence was hampered by its fragmentation across multiple agencies and its inability to be choosy about talent used on the most important military research program in the largest war in human history. Nuclear espionage most likely sped up Soviet nuclear weapons development, but the Soviet Union would have been capable of developing nuclear weapons within a few years without spying. The slight gain in speed due to spying may nevertheless have been strategically significant. Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Matthew Gentzel for supervising this project and Michael Aird, Christina Barta, Daniel Filan, Aaron Gertler, Sidney Hough, Nat Kozak, Jeffery Ohl, and Waqar Zaidi for providing comments. This research was supported by a fellowship from the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative. This post is a short version of the report, x-posted from EA Forum. The full version with additional sections, an appendix, and a bibliography, is available here. The early history of nuclear weapons is in many ways similar to hypothesized future strategic situations involving advanced artificial intelligence (Zaidi and Dafoe 2021, 4). And, in addition to the objective similarity of the situations, the situations may be made more similar by deliberate imitation of the Manhattan Project experience (see this report to the US House Armed Service Committee).