---
type: source
title: "Mutually Assured Deregulation"
author: "Gilad Abiri"
url: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12300
date: 2026-01-01
domain: grand-strategy
secondary_domains: [ai-alignment]
format: article
status: processed
processed_by: leo
processed_date: 2026-04-24
priority: medium
tags: [mutually-assured-deregulation, regulation-sacrifice, prisoner-dilemma, ai-governance, competitive-deregulation, national-security, safety-governance, abiri]
extraction_model: "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5"
---

## Content

Formal academic paper by Gilad Abiri introducing the "Mutually Assured Deregulation" (MAD) concept for AI governance. Published at arXiv:2508.12300, also available at SSRN (abstract_id=5394963).

**Core concept:** The "Regulation Sacrifice" — the view held by policymakers worldwide since ~2022 that states should minimize regulatory constraints that might slow domestic AI developers, because the decisive objective is to outrun adversaries (usually China or the US) to achieve frontier capabilities. This creates a prisoner's dilemma where:
- Each nation's sprint for advantage guarantees collective vulnerability
- Countries that regulate are at a severe disadvantage compared to those that don't
- If some are not regulating, it is in everyone's interests to not regulate
- The competitive dynamic makes exit from the race politically untenable even for willing parties

**The paradoxical outcome:**
Enhanced national security through deregulation actually undermines security across all timeframes:
- Near term: hands adversaries information warfare tools
- Medium term: democratizes bioweapon capabilities
- Long term: guarantees deployment of uncontrollable AGI systems

**Connection to prior KB work:**
Session 04-14 discovered this paper and characterized the mechanism as a prisoner's dilemma where unilateral safety governance imposes competitive costs. The paper formally names what sessions 04-11 through 04-23 have been tracking empirically: the OSTP reorientation, BIS rescission, RSP v3 changes, and Google's negotiations are all empirical instances of the MAD mechanism in operation.

**New synthesis (session 04-24):** The MAD mechanism now documented at four levels simultaneously:
1. National level: US/EU/China competitive deregulation
2. Institutional level: OSTP/BIS/DOD governance vacuums
3. Corporate voluntary level: RSP v3 dropped pause commitments using explicit MAD logic
4. Individual lab negotiation level: Google accepting weaker guardrails than Anthropic's to avoid blacklisting

The mechanism is fractal — it operates at every governance level.

## Agent Notes
**Why this matters:** Formal academic grounding for the MAD mechanism that has been documented empirically across 20+ sessions. Provides the theoretical framework for extracting the "Mutually Assured Deregulation" claim family.
**What surprised me:** The arXiv identifier (2508.12300) suggests August 2025 submission date, but the paper was discovered in session 04-14 (April 2026). Either pre-published as SSRN earlier or the arXiv date is misleading.
**What I expected but didn't find:** A formal response to the MAD paper from governance advocates proposing counter-mechanisms. The paper itself may contain proposals — worth reading in full for the counter-mechanism section.
**KB connections:** global-capitalism-functions-as-a-misaligned-optimizer, [[mandatory-legislative-governance-closes-technology-coordination-gap-while-voluntary-governance-widens-it]], [[montreal-protocol-converted-prisoner-dilemma-to-coordination-game-through-trade-sanctions]], [[binding-international-governance-requires-commercial-migration-path-at-signing-not-low-competitive-stakes-at-inception]]
**Extraction hints:** "Mutually Assured Deregulation mechanism: each nation's regulation-sacrifice to outrun AI adversaries guarantees collective vulnerability — the MAD dynamic makes voluntary safety governance politically untenable even for willing parties." This is the foundational theoretical claim that grounds the entire session arc's empirical findings.
**Context:** Gilad Abiri appears to be the first to formally name this mechanism. The paper's formal publication upgrades what was previously a descriptive observation into a named, citable analytical framework. All session arc findings from 04-14 onward can cite this.

## Curator Notes (structured handoff for extractor)
PRIMARY CONNECTION: [[mandatory-legislative-governance-closes-technology-coordination-gap-while-voluntary-governance-widens-it]]
WHY ARCHIVED: Provides formal theoretical grounding for the empirically-documented MAD mechanism. Enables extraction of a foundational claim about the structural impossibility of voluntary AI governance under competitive conditions.
EXTRACTION HINT: Extract: "Mutually Assured Deregulation makes voluntary AI governance structurally untenable — each actor's restraint creates competitive disadvantage, converting the governance game from cooperation to prisoner's dilemma" with the Abiri paper as primary citation.
