---
type: source
title: "Crucial Considerations in ASI Deterrence"
author: "Oscar Delaney (Institute for AI Policy and Strategy)"
url: https://www.iaps.ai/research/crucial-considerations-in-asi-deterrence
date: 2025-04-01
domain: ai-alignment
secondary_domains: [grand-strategy]
format: article
status: processed
processed_by: theseus
processed_date: 2026-05-03
priority: high
tags: [MAIM, deterrence, ASI, probability-assessment, red-lines, critique, IAPS]
intake_tier: research-task
extraction_model: "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5"
---

## Content

Delaney reformulates MAIM as three explicit premises with probability estimates:

**Three-premise structure:**
1. **China expects disempowerment** if the US achieves unilateral ASI dominance — P ≈ 70%
2. **China will take MAIMing actions** to prevent this — P ≈ 60%
3. **The US will acquiesce** (back down) rather than risk escalation — P ≈ 60%

**Overall MAIM scenario probability (descriptive): ~25%**

**Critiques of each premise:**
- P1 (disempowerment): Nuclear deterrence makes complete Chinese disempowerment unlikely even under ASI dominance — air-gapped systems and distributed arsenals make full disarmament implausible
- P2 (China MAIMs): Kinetic strikes trigger fierce retaliation; if takeoff is gradual and espionage effective, China may expect to catch up rather than MAIM
- P3 (US backs down): This requires China to believe the US won't escalate; given US nuclear and conventional deterrents, this credibility is uncertain

**The red lines problem:**
"There is no definitive point at which an AI project becomes sufficiently existentially dangerous...to warrant MAIMing actions." Unlike nuclear deterrence, AI development is:
- Continuous (not discrete events)
- Ambiguous (salami-slicing: incremental compute increases without clear trigger points)
- Multi-dimensional (algorithmic + compute + talent)

Counter: "strategic ambiguity can also deter" — an uncertain red line may be as deterring as a clear one. Gradual escalation (observable reactions to smaller provocations) can communicate red lines empirically.

**Robust interventions that transcend the MAIM debate:**
Regardless of MAIM's validity, Delaney identifies actions that make sense under both MAIM and non-MAIM scenarios:
- Verification R&D (build the monitoring infrastructure MAIM requires)
- Alignment research (improve technical alignment regardless of deterrence)
- Government AI monitoring (increase state capacity to observe AI development)

**Nuclear deterrence challenge:** Even ASI will struggle to overcome nuclear deterrence — fully disempowering China requires disarming its nuclear arsenal, which remains difficult even for a superintelligent system operating in real-world physical constraints.

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** The 25% base-rate probability estimate is the most rigorous quantification of MAIM's scenario in the debate. This is important: even MAIM's proponents can't clearly establish that the deterrence scenario is the likely future. At 25%, MAIM is plausible but not the default. The 75% of scenarios where MAIM's logic doesn't hold are the more likely ones — and in those scenarios, technical alignment and collective superintelligence arguments become more urgent, not less.

**What surprised me:** The "nuclear deterrence challenge" — even ASI can't easily overcome distributed nuclear arsenals. This suggests the worst MAIM scenario (ASI-enabled total disempowerment) is harder to achieve than the paper implies, which is actually reassuring for the baseline threat level but undermines MAIM's urgency framing.

**What I expected but didn't find:** A blanket dismissal of MAIM. Instead, Delaney treats it seriously but assigns only 25% probability. The "robust interventions" section is the most practically useful — actions that are good regardless of MAIM's validity. This is how a policy analyst should engage with high-uncertainty strategic scenarios.

**KB connections:**
- [[the first mover to superintelligence likely gains decisive strategic advantage]] — Delaney complicates this with the nuclear deterrence challenge; decisive advantage may be harder than assumed
- [[multipolar failure from competing aligned AI systems may pose greater existential risk than any single misaligned superintelligence]] — Delaney's framework is about preventing unilateral dominance; the multipolar failure risk emerges if MAIM succeeds (stable multipolar world) rather than fails

**Extraction hints:**
- Probability assessment claim candidate: "MAIM's deterrent scenario has an estimated 25% base-rate probability when decomposed into three premises with independent uncertainty, making non-MAIM scenarios the modal future" (confidence: experimental — one analyst's estimate)
- Red lines claim candidate: "ASI deterrence red lines are structurally fuzzier than nuclear deterrence red lines because AI development is continuous and algorithmically opaque, enabling salami-slicing that never triggers clear intervention" (confidence: likely, multi-source)
- Enrichment: nuclear deterrence challenge adds nuance to [[the first mover to superintelligence likely gains decisive strategic advantage]] — physical deterrent systems may limit first-mover advantage

## Curator Notes (structured handoff for extractor)
PRIMARY CONNECTION: [[multipolar failure from competing aligned AI systems may pose greater existential risk than any single misaligned superintelligence]]
WHY ARCHIVED: Rigorous probability decomposition of MAIM scenario; 25% estimate is the key datum for evaluating MAIM's policy relevance; "robust interventions" section is actionable regardless of MAIM's validity
EXTRACTION HINT: Extract the red lines fuzziness claim as standalone. The 25% probability estimate is too speculative for a KB claim but provides useful calibration context for the extractor's notes.
