The current bottleneck is political will, not research

Summary

Abstract: We already know enough to act. I wish we were in a world where research was the bottleneck, but the main constraint on AI safety is no longer a shortage of clever policy ideas: best practices already exist and are not being applied or enforced, and a serious international (or even just national) regulatory regime would probably cut most of the risk. They are not applied because awareness is low. The people who narrate and enforce AI policy mostly do not believe the problem exists. I estimate that a majority of the top ~100–1,000 most influential policymakers worldwide have never had a single serious conversation about catastrophic risk, and this is the main reason they are not worried[1]. Even among the civil-society organizations that showed up to the UN Global Dialogue, exactly one of the 1,534 written submissions mentions "takeover", and less than 1% mention x-risks. They've never had the conversation because our field under-invests in having it. Status rewards research over advocacy (~3.6 researchers per advocate in US AI safety); many organizations self-censor; funders treat repetition as redundancy, even though repetition is how anyone actually gets convinced. Meanwhile, the industry secured 7× as many meetings with the European Commission on AI as civil society (2023). Therefore, an additional unit of effort does more good through advocacy and engagement than through research. Judge work in AI governance by minds moved, not by clever papers. I give a list of potential directions/projects in the last section to alleviate this problem.[2] We're plausibly only a few years from a catastrophe. Fable 5 cracked open a brief window of attention, but policymakers are still worried about the wrong risks. This is our chance to wake them up. Source: February 2026 Summit on Existential Security survey of AI safety leaders. Advocacy, policy and governance were stated as the top priorities. It seems to me that there is still much to do to act on this. ⚠️ Epistemic status: I have skin in this game, which is either a conflict of interest or two years of data, depending on how you see things: I run a think tank that does this type of activity, so discount accordingly. I preferred to ship quickly rather than not ship at all, or ship too late. I expect some claims not to be stable under reflection, but the core argument is one I hold with reasonable conviction. See this as a bottle in the ocean. My point is not to dunk on research. I think that research is how we keep finding unknown unknowns; nothing in this post argues for stopping it. AI safety is one of the hardest fields to navigate, and I’ve often wondered if what I do is pointless. I might be wrong about the net-positiveness of some types of AI regulations, but I feel that the level of the discourse is really bad, the conversation is not happening, and I want this conversation to happen before irreversible things start happening. Thanks to Epi Gedeon, Arthur Grimonpont, Alexandre Variengien, Jack Stennett, and Jonathan Salter for useful feedback and suggestions.          1 — The bottleneck is political will, not research This section defines what I mean by political will and then argues that we are not applying basic best practices, so having more ideas is clearly not the bottleneck. What do I call “political will”? Start with a single policymaker. They have to move along a pipeline like: Level 0: aware that serious people think there's a big problem. Level 1: convinced of AI x-risks. Level 2: engaged: actively pushing for existential safety. Level 3: champion: actively pushing for safety even at some cost or in an isolated way "Political will" in the aggregate is just this funnel run across the people who set, enforce, and narrate policy. Spoiler: Level 0 sounds like a low bar. It is. The median meeting I've had with a senior policymaker starts below it. In the international forums I've attended, my rough estimate is that at least a third of the policymakers I've personally met are not even at Level 0. Domestic legislatures are a bit further along: 40 current members of US Congress have now publicly discussed AGI or loss of control, up from a handful in early 2023, doubling roughly every 5.5 months[3]. Those public discussions are at Level 0 or 1. This covers 7% of Congress. At Level 3, I count roughly 3.[4] The best practices we already have are not being applied Unfortunately, red everywhere. https://ailabwatch.org/ . CeSIA will soon publish something more up to date on the Code of Practice. According to SaferAI’s rating, 35% is currently the highest overall assessment score, given to Anthropic. 59% is currently the best overall assessment score if a company adopted all the industry best practices found across companies. Where’s my DNA synthesis screening? DNA Screening is a reasonable, long-advocated measure that was even mentioned in the American AI Action Plan, but is still not mandated. It's the canonical example of how glacially even