USA and China Will Each Be BETRAYED By Their Own AIs — Adam Khoja, Center for AI Safety

Adam Khoja is a top AI forecaster who led the 2023 Center for AI Safety statement that shattered the Overton window on AI extinction risk. We cover his background, Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM), his new paper on AI betrayal, and whether Yudkowsky’s theoretical alignment research was a dead end. Then Adam makes the case that an international AI slowdown is within reach today. All it takes is US and Chinese auditors inside each other’s AI labs. It worked for nuclear weapons, so why couldn’t it work for data centers? Adam puts his P(Doom) at 40%, right next to my 50%. The real disagreement is how we get out of this: theory or empirics, MIRI or the labs. Enjoy the ride. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqESBXuo6EI Timestamps 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:00:36 — Introducing Adam Khoja 00:02:45 — Leading the Statement on AI Risk as a Sophomore 00:10:17 — The Statement Leaked on Manifold 00:15:11 — Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM) 00:24:58 — Is Frontier AI Harder to Hide Than a Nuke? 00:32:09 — The AI Deterrence Escalation Ladder 00:36:10 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™ 00:38:01 — Where Adam Departs from Yudkowsky 00:42:30 — Liron Explains Intellidynamics 00:47:26 — Neats vs. Scruffies in Deep Learning 00:55:27 — AI Deterrence by Betrayal 01:01:52 — Subversion vs. Overt Co-option 01:05:34 — Could the Government Seize the Labs’ AI? 01:07:29 — The Offense-Defense Balance of AI Security 01:12:46 — An International AI Slowdown Is Ready 01:15:51 — Does Adam Support PauseAI? 01:16:37 — “We’re All Already Spying on Each Other” 01:19:28 — Airstrikes on Rogue Data Centers 01:24:23 — Safety Research During a Slowdown 01:27:54 — Governance Over Technical Research 01:31:14 — Join the Center for AI Safety Links Adam Khoja (personal site) — https://adamkhoja.com/ Adam Khoja's Substack — https://adamkhoja.substack.com/ Adam's July 2023 Manifold market — "Will OpenAI's Superalignment project produce a significant breakthrough in alignment research before 2027?" — https://manifold.markets/AdamK/will-openais-superalignment-project Center for AI Safety — careers / job board — https://safe.ai/careers Statement on AI Risk (Center for AI Safety, May 2023) — the one-sentence statement Adam project-led, with full signatory list — https://safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk "Superintelligence Strategy" — Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt & Alexandr Wang (Mutual Assured AI Malfunction / MAIM) — https://www.nationalsecurity.ai/ "AI Deterrence by Betrayal" — Adam Khoja, Aiden Kim et al. (CAIS, 2026) — https://www.aibetrayal.com/ "An International AI Slowdown Is Ready Whenever Politicians Are" — Adam Khoja, AI Frontiers — https://newsletter.ai-frontiers.org/p/an-international-ai-slowdown-is-ready Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter (Future of Life Institute, March 2023) — the "Pause letter" that preceded the CAIS Statement — https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/ Introducing Superalignment (OpenAI, July 2023) — Ilya Sutskever & Jan Leike's four-year goal — https://openai.com/index/introducing-superalignment/ Pacing the Frontier — the 2026 letter signed by 1,100+ frontier-lab employees — https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/ Why Iran targeted Amazon data centers (The Conversation) — the precedent Adam cites for strikes on compute — https://theconversation.com/why-iran-targeted-amazon-data-centers-and-what-that-does-and-doesnt-change-about-warfare-278642 Anthropic says Trump admin has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 (CNBC) — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/30/anthropic-says-trump-admin-has-lifted-export-controls-on-claude-fable-5-and-mythos-5.html Mark Zuckerberg — "Personal Superintelligence" — https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/ Resolution — the theory-plus-empirics alignment org Adam is excited about — https://resolution.org/ Rationality: From AI to Zombies — Eliezer Yudkowsky's Sequences — https://www.readthesequences.com/ Robin Hanson — Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs (prediction markets as decision processes) — https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html The OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident — original Black Hat USA 2026 talk — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY OpenAI's Model Just ATTACKED Them — the Hugging Face hack breakdown — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RczYubQzXbI Robin Hanson vs. Liron Shapira: Is Near-Term Extinction From AGI Plausible? — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTQb6N3_zu8 Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate. Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏 Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe