The Balance of AI Power: Anton Leicht on Politics, Pacing Deals, and Muddling Through Well
Anton Leicht, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of Threading the Needle, joins Nathan Labenz to explore how political and institutional power can be preserved as artificial intelligence advances. They discuss the strategic trade-offs of frontier training pauses, the hurdles facing industry self-regulation, and how middle powers can trade data center capacity and semiconductor leverage for model access. Ultimately, Leicht emphasizes that preventing permanent disempowerment and the monopolization of control by private labs or single governments is just as critical as addressing catastrophic model risks. For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/the-balance-of-ai-power-anton-leicht-on-politics-pacing-deals-and-muddling-through-well/ Sponsors: Mercury Command: Mercury Command brings powerful conversational AI directly into your banking, providing real-time natural language access to your finances without exposing data to third-party tools. Learn more and apply online in minutes at https://mercury.com Athena: Athena matches you with a dedicated, top 1% executive assistant to handle your inbox, calendar, and daily workflows so you can save an average of 15 hours a week. Get matched with your EA today at https://athena.com/cognitive OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform that enables enterprises to engineer, orchestrate, and govern AI applications on a single unified platform. Learn more and see how it works at https://outsystems.com/tcr Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr CHAPTERS: (00:00) About the Episode (04:46) Sponsor: Mercury Command (06:33) Assessing current AI dangers (13:17) Feasibility of AI pauses (Part 1) (21:33) Sponsors: Athena | OutSystems (25:05) Feasibility of AI pauses (Part 2)
