⚡ Quick Summary
Published by the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, this report compares nine strategic visions for navigating a transition to a world with artificial superintelligence (ASI). It is intended to help policy entrepreneurs select visions and identify policy objectives that remain valuable under uncertainty. The analysis focuses on three severe and potentially irrecoverable risks: AI takeover by misaligned systems, war driven by competitive dynamics around AI, and extreme concentration of power.
The report organises the visions along two axes: centralized versus distributed control, and private versus government control. It examines three private-company-led, three U.S. government-controlled, and three internationalized approaches. For each, it considers feasibility, how it handles the three risks, and its advantages and disadvantages. It then relates the visions to six policy goals, including developer cybersecurity, transparency, U.S.-China coordination, and limiting frontier capability progress. Finally, it identifies eight empirical “cruxes”, including AI timelines, takeoff speed, the prospect of a decisive strategic advantage, international cooperation, and the difficulty of alignment and control.
🧩 What’s Covered
- Scope and concepts: Defines ASI as systems that significantly outperform humans across a wide range of cognitive domains, and introduces AGI timelines, takeoff dynamics, intelligence recursion, race dynamics, and the “alignment tax”. It specifies AI takeover, war, and extreme power concentration as the risks in scope, while noting that misuse risks and potential benefits of advanced AI are not assessed in depth.
- Analytical map: Places the nine visions on private/government-led and distributed/centralized-control axes. Table 1 gives the authors’ subjective colour-coded assessments of each vision’s performance on takeover, war, power concentration, and feasibility.
- Private development visions: Covers competing private projects under light-touch regulation, a single private project with a durable lead, and a global private project drawing financing, talent, compute, and energy infrastructure from many countries. Each analysis considers incentives for alignment, market competition, legitimacy, and consolidation.
- U.S.-led visions: Examines U.S. leadership with domestic regulation, a centralized U.S. government project, and a U.S.-plus-allies government project. It discusses tools such as safety cases, third-party evaluations, export controls, public-private partnerships, and resource pooling among allies.
- Internationalized visions and transitions: Describes managed international competition and deterrence, a global centralized government project, and a global coordinated regulator with verification and enforcement powers. Figure 3 maps plausible pathways between visions and conditions that could prompt transitions.
- Policy implications: Assesses support, opposition, or neutrality across visions for stronger developer cybersecurity and transparency, greater U.S. government focus on AGI/ASI, U.S.-China risk coordination, a larger U.S. lead over China, and slower frontier capability advancement. It supplies an illustrative policy for each objective.
- Cruxes: Surveys reasons for and against eight claims that shape vision choice: near-term AGI, rapid ASI after AGI, a durable AI lead, ASI conferring a decisive strategic advantage, U.S. government prioritization, sustainable international cooperation, government trustworthiness, and profound alignment difficulty.
💡 Why it matters?
The report provides a structured way to distinguish disagreements about individual AI policies from disagreements about the wider strategic conditions those policies assume. For policymakers and governance teams, it shows why measures such as strict cybersecurity, transparency requirements, export controls, international dialogue, or compute limits may be supported under some pathways but resisted under others.
It is particularly relevant where safety measures interact with competition and national-security concerns. For example, the report treats cybersecurity as broadly valuable but notes that very strong security could alter deterrence dynamics in some internationalized visions. Its cruxes also identify the factual questions that could change policy priorities as evidence develops.
❓ What’s Missing
The report deliberately restricts its assessment to takeover, war, and extreme power concentration. It says that future work could assess a broader set of advanced-AI risks and more fully consider potential upsides. Misuse risks are discussed only to explain why they are not the central focus: the report argues that many misuse mitigations apply across most visions. The authors also describe their literature survey as informal and state that original proponents may not agree with their characterisations. The treatment of the eight cruxes is intentionally brief rather than a full resolution of those research questions, and the policy section offers illustrative objectives rather than implementation-ready legal or institutional designs.
👥 Best For
Policy entrepreneurs, AI-governance researchers, and public-sector strategy teams comparing the assumptions behind domestic regulation, U.S.-led development, allied projects, and international coordination. It is also suited to analysts testing how cybersecurity, transparency, export controls, dialogue, and capability pacing fit different anticipated AI-development trajectories.
📄 Source Details
Strategic Visions in AI Governance: Mapping Pathways to Victory was published by the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy in January 2026. The named authors are Oscar Delaney, Maria Kostylew, Oliver Guest, and Peter Wildeford. The English-language PDF comprises a cover and 43 numbered report pages; no edition or URL for this document is printed.
