Broadsheet

The Oregon Department of Transportation’s systematic mismanagement and deception have turned Portland’s I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project into a fiscal black hole.

Highest cost project in the US: At $3.5 billion for a 1.5-mile stretch, the Rose Quarter project now costs roughly $2.3 billion per mile—making it the second most expensive highway project in the United States, behind only the nearby $15 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement ($3 billion/mile).
Seven-fold cost increase: Since the Oregon Legislature approved an initial $450 million allocation in 2017, ODOT’s cost estimates have ballooned seven-fold to $3.5 billion, resulting in a current $2 billion funding gap.
Deceptive accounting. ODOT low-balled initial cost estimates to sell the project, never got legislative approval for cost increases, relied on over-optimistic revenue assumptions, commenced construction with a huge funding gap, and rather than facing reality, has been playing “extend and pretend” as costs exploded and revenue evaporated.
The “driving stakes” strategy: By breaking ground on a tiny fragment (“Phase 1A”)–with more than $1.5 billion unfunded–ODOT used classic Robert Moses tactics to force political officials into providing further funding.
ODOT is effectively insolvent: ODOT’s long-running reign of error is bankrupting the agency. Due almost entirely to persistent and growing megaproject cost overruns costing billions, ODOT is now functionally insolvent, even as it confronts a $200 million operating deficit
Overspending to create land: Promised caps meant to heal the Albina neighborhood work out to an absurd $400 million to $800 million per acre of buildable land—roughly 100 to 200 times the market price for adjacent properties.

On a per mile basis, it’s one of the two most expensive highway projects in the nation. The project is about 1.5 miles long, and will cost about $3.5 billion (according to the new estimate), or about $2.3 billion per mile. (The only one more expensive is the I-5 Interstate Bridge Project, which will cost $3 billion per mile).

In 2017, the Oregon Legislature naively approved ODOT’s request for $450 million to widen I-5 at the Rose Quarter. According to the latest estimates, the project cost has now exploded almost eight-fold to $3.5 billion.

With no sense of irony, ODOT released the new $3.5 billion price tag barely 60 days after the Department briefed the Oregon Transportation Commission about its liability for “major projects” and stated the total cost of the Rose Quarter was a mere $2.2 billion. As result of leaving out the $15 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement, and leaving out more than $1 billion of the cost of the Rose Quarter, the report understated Oregon’s liability for highway projects by more than $5 billion.

The agency, which diverted money intended for the project to other priorities (which it has since re-arranged to restore funding) and which spent years blundering through the community involvement process and designing the project–which is vastly wider and larger than needed to add just one auxiliary lane in each direction, as ODOT claims.

The new higher cost of the Rose Quarter project

Carlos Fuentes of The Oregonian broke the story of the new estimate on August 4, 2026. The materials prepared for the August 13 meeting of the Oregon Transportation Commission don’t actually show the entire cost of the project on any slide, preferring instead to break the project into phases (and sub-phases) and to show the cost of individual pieces, rather than the big, bad bottom line. Here’s our summary of their estimate. We’ve also added in $125 million which represents the funds Oregon DOT spent on the project through 2024 before beginning construction (the materials in the ODOT presentation don’t indicate that these planning costs were included in the “phased” construction cost breakout).

For those who’ve been following the project, this is just the latest in a long series of escalating costs. ODOT told lawmakers it would cost $450 million in 2017, and have been raising the ante every year or two since. We’ve run out of adjectives to describe the exploding cost of the project. Barely a year later, in 2018, the price had doubled. In 2021, we reported that it had tripled. In 2023, quadrupled. In 2025, up another $200 million. And now, a jump of more than a billion, bringing the total cost of the project to more than seven times the original price tag. One would have to be gullible to believe that if the project goes forward the cost won’t increase even more.

The Rose Quarter, like the now $15 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement Project, and the $815 million I-205 Abernethy Bridge is symptomatic of what we call ODOT’s “reign of error.” Virtually every major construction project for the past two decades has gone 200 percent or more over budget. The Rose Quarter, at a seven-fold increase is just the current record-holder. It’s evidence of deep dysfunction in the Oregon Department of Transportation. As we’ve testified repeatedly to the Oregon Transportation Commission and the Oregon Legislature, it’s a management axiom that you get the behavior you reward. Time and time–and time again–when faced with massive cost overruns, these public officials frown, shrug their shoulders, and give the same people more money to make further mistakes that will cost the public hundreds of millions, and now billions of dollars.

It’s difficult to put these numbers in context. ODOT is famous for downplaying or denying culpability for cost-overruns and forgetting or disappearing their original cost estimates hide the scale of this problem. It’s hard for ordinary citizens, and even legislators, to put these numbers in perspective. But here’s something that should help: We can now show that these two large ODOT highway projects are now the most expensive highway projects in the country.

Portland: Home of the most expensive freeway projects in the nation

There’s a good case to be made that the Rose Quarter and its nearby boondoggle companion–the Interstate Bridge Project–are, mile-for-mile–now the two most expensive highway projects in the nation. There’s no single, authoritative list of current and planned highway projects, so as a first step, we enlisted the assistance of Google’s Gemini AI to compile a list of what it found to be the most expensive current highway project in each of the 50 states, ranked by millions of dollars per centerline mile of project length (a rough yardstick of project scale). The usual caveats apply about AI-generated content, but at first glance, the list reflects most of the well-known projects underway around the country. (We’ll update the list as we acquire more accurate information, and we invite readers to offer corrections and amplifications).

Based on this crude AI-assisted data compilation, at first glance, it looks like the two Portland area projects are the #1 and #2 most expensive highway projects (per mile) in the nation. The 5-mile long Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) clocks in at about $3 billion/mile and the 1.5 mile Rose Quarter at about $2.3 billion/mile. (This chart shows the most expensive project in the top ten states; full data for the remaining states is shown at the end of this commentary).

These data suggest that Oregon is not simply a representative victim of highway cost inflation, but is actively the worst DOT in the nation in managing highway project costs. That conclusion is also consistent with data on construction costs compiled by Yale University’s Zachary Liscow, who found that Oregon’s costs for routine road repairs were about double the national average.

A Predictable Result of Mismanagement and Bad Faith by ODOT

While the agency likes to paint itself as the helpless victim of rising costs, that’s utterly false. Every step of the way, ODOT has made decisions that have driven up the project’s cost, delayed its progress. Here’s a quick list of their deceptive tactics.

Lowball initial estimates. In 2017, ODOT told the Legislature the Rose Quarter project would cost $450 million–and legislators dutifully set aside just that amount of money in HB 2017, a major transportation package. The agency either knew, or should have known, that its estimate was unrealistically low; less than two years later, they admitted the price tag for exactly the same project scope was almost double ($795 million). Lowballing the quoted price is a classic “bait-and-switch” sales tactic. (And ODOT did the same thing with its other megaprojects, selling the $885 million Abernethy Bridge with a $250 million 2018 “Cost-to-Complete” report, and reviving the $15 billion Interstate Bridge Project based on a 2020 $4.5 billion cost estimate).

Excessive revenue optimism. ODOT represented that the project was somehow a great candidate for federal funding. While it did (temporarily) get a $450 million Biden Administration grant, the bulk of those funds were rescinded by Congress. More ominously, a follow-on request for $750 million in federal funds was denied by the Biden Administration in 2024. ODOT also implied it could use revenue from value pricing (which it only half-heartedly pursued), and which was abandoned by the Governor and repealed by the 2025 Legislature.

Extend and pretend. In the face of ballooning costs and imaginary or evaporating revenues, ODOT simply stuck its head in the sand, and hoped that someday somebody would come up with more money for this “very important project.” This is the classic financial gambit of “extend and pretend“–extend the life of the project, and hope against hope that somehow the money will show up.

Never confirming a legislative commitment to actual costs. At no step along this process did ODOT ever return to the Legislature and ask if they still wanted the project, given its vastly greater costs and the disappearance of hoped for revenue. Instead, ODOT leaders continued to invoke the “commitment” to a much cheaper project that was made years and years earlier by a Legislature with no knowledge of ODOT’s subsequent mismanagement or worsening financial problems.

Driving stakes, selling bonds. Finally, in 2025, ODOT started construction on the project itself, or actually a minuscule fragment of the project, what it called “Phase 1A,” even though it was more than $1.5 billion short of what it needed to build the project. This is the classic Robert Moses strategy of “driving stakes”–doing anything, saying anything, just to get a project started, and then using that partially completed project to pressure political officials to come up with more money. It’s a cynical and irresponsible approach that only serves to worsen Oregon’s transportation funding problems.

Consultant capture. ODOT leans heavily on outside consultants to plan and design these major projects, and as independent outside experts have observed, excessive reliance on consultants creates a classic “principal-agent” problem. Consultants actually make more money when projects grow bigger, become more expensive and take longer. They have no incentive to manage costs or meet deadlines. As we’ve reported, they’ve turned the Interstate Bridge Replacement project into a “forever” program, which having take 20 years to plan–at a cost of nearly $500 million, will generate a further billion dollars in consultant and staff costs over the next twenty years they think it will take to build it. ODOT has paid more than $125 million for consultants on the Rose Quarter project.

Making phony excuses. ODOT offers the laughable proposition that the reason the project continues to grow in cost is because, essentially, they weren’t given even more money, faster. Yet it was they who low-balled the initial cost estimate, repeatedly delayed the project’s planning and scope, never asked the Legislature if it agreed to the new higher price-tag, assumed they would get generous federal funding, and who launched the project with only a tiny fraction of the needed cash in hand. It’s critical to note that ODOT routinely fails to advance projects according to its own schedules, and systematically alters its reports to falsely claim projects are on schedule. ODOT also pointedly and repeatedly refused to look at right-sizing the project to make it more affordable–even after its own international experts said the project was at least 40 feet too wide. Even today, they are continuing with their “extend and pretend” strategy, asking to move ahead with Phase 1B even though the project faces an admitted $2 billion funding hole.

A poor real estate investment

As bad as they are at investing in sensible transportation infrastructure, the Rose Quarter project shows that ODOT is even worse at real estate investment. One rationalization for the project is that it may–if ever completed–include a partial “cover” over the Interstate 5 freeway, which is represented as a way to heal the damage done to the historically Black neighborhood done when the freeway was constructed six decades ago. Some in the community campaigned for “buildable” covers, which combined with the project’s bloated width doubling the freeway from 82 feet to 160 feet, contributes to the project’s excessive cost. It’s highly questionable how widening the road to accommodate more traffic will mitigate the damage done by traffic and auto-dependent uses. Building freeway covers is also the most expensive possible way to acquire buildable land in Northeast Portland. According to ODOT, the covers and adjacent land will provide about 4-8 acres of partially buildable property when the project is completed. At $3.5 billion, that works out to spending about $400 to $800 million per acre for building sites, in an area where land goes for between $80-120 per square foot (for land zoned for 4-6 story buildings), or about $4-5 million per acre, meaning that the project cost per acre of buildable land is roughly 100 to 200 times more expensive that simply buying property in the area. That money would be far better spent on badly needed housing–which has been an allowable source of mitigation for highway projects. And, as the Oregonian pointed out, the central city of Portland has four major redevelopment areas (the NW Broadway corridor, Lloyd Center, OMSI and the remainder of Albina) all land-rich and investment-poor.

In effect, ODOT was hoisted by its own petard. It claimed that its plan for a highway cover was a “restorative justice” project to redress the damage its freeway construction did to Portland’s historically Black Albina neighborhood. But its original plan was really just a slightly wider overpass. The local community rebelled against that, and Governor Kate Brown, in an effort to revive the project, empaneled a new design effort which came up with a plan for a slightly larger, and vastly more expensive set of covers. These self-inflicted project delays and scope creep drove the cost of the project still higher.

ODOT has cynically used its feigned concern for the damage its past work did to the neighborhood to garner political support from the Black community. But given ODOT’s staging of the project, it seems likely that the much ballyhooed “covers” will be the very last thing that will be funded and built, even if the project goes forward. ODOT has arranged the project schedule so the highway widening happens first, and the covers have been deferred to the (unfunded) Phase 2 portion of the project.

And ODOT has sold the project as a financial boon to the region, the city and the neighborhood. But paying for the Rose Quarter is likely to be a black hole that absorbs every available dollar that ODOT has to spend in the Portland area–making it nearly impossible to pay for any other local or regional priorities until after the current $2 billion hole is filled. In effect, the Rose Quarter freeway widening will become the City of Portland (and the Metro region’s) “ask” for state and federal funding for the indefinite future.

A DOT in Denial

Unsurprisingly, the Oregon Department of Transportation is mired in a profound and worsening fiscal crisis. It announced layoffs last year, after the Oregon Legislature failed, twice to pass a new tax measure to pump more funds into ODOT. The regular session of the legislature adjourned without passing a transportation funding bill; the special session’s attempt to raise gas taxes and vehicle registration fees was resoundingly rejected by voters—83 percent “no” to less than 17 percent “yes”— in a May 2026 referendum.

And now the Governor has convened a “Restoring our Transportation Vision” working group—staffed by ODOT and ODOT-dependent consultants—to ponder the state’s transportation finance situation. While the group has mentioned megaprojects in passing, the effort is still in deep denial about the fundamental reasons for ODOT’s fiscal crisis. It claims that increased fuel efficiency and electric vehicles have cut into revenue, but has utterly failed to own up to literally billions of dollars of cost increases on all of its major projects. As we’ve noted at City Observatory, you can’t fix a problem that you don’t admit you have. ODOT’s financial problems center on the massive cost of a handful of megaprojects, and the agency’s utter inability (or willingness) to manage these costs, something this working group has failed to grapple with in any meaningful fashion.

This massive cost increase comes at a time when ODOT can’t even pay to maintain a reduced level of its most basic services. Just weeks ago, ODOT acknowledged that it faces a $200 million biennial budget deficit, and will likely have to lay off ten percent of its workforce in the coming biennium.

In effect, ODOT is simply insolvent: Its liabilities–particularly the massive unfunded commitments for the I-5 Rose Quarter and Interstate Bridge Replacement project–exceed its stream of revenues. It cannot even maintain the infrastructure it has, and it’s making open-ended commitments to projects that are the most expensive in the nation, even as it has no public support for its current budget. The root cause of these problems has everything to do with megaproject cost explosion and mismanagement, not the relatively trivial changes in the agency’s revenue streams due to fuel efficiency, or even rising construction cost inflation.

This is not something that just happened recently. Bloated costs have been a perennial problem for ODOT projects. More than a decade ago, the influential Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio, then chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, lambasted ODOT for the high cost of the bloated Interstate Bridge Project. Fifteen years ago, he told the media:

“I kept on telling the project to keep the costs down, don’t build a gold-plated project,” a clearly frustrated DeFazio said. “How can you have a $4 billion project? . . . The Columbia River Crossing problem was thrown out to engineers, it wasn’t overseen: they said solve all the problems in this twelve-mile corridor and they did it in a big engineering way, and not in an appropriate way. . . . They let the engineers loose, told them to solve all the region’s infrastructure problems in one fell swoop…

DeFazio was so naive. Since then, of course, the project’s price tag has doubled (to $7.5 billion in 2023) and then doubled again, to $15 billion (late last year).

Appendix: List of most expensive highway projects in the US, by state

Rank	State	Primary Megaproject Name	Estimated Cost	Length	Cost / Mile ($M)
1	Oregon/Washington	Interstate Bridge Replacement (WA/OR I-5)	$15.00 Billion	~5.0 mi	$3,000M
2	Oregon	I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project	$3.50 Billion	~1.5 mi	$2,333M
3	Massachusetts	Allston I-90 Multimodal Project (Boston)	$2.00 Billion	~1.5 mi	$1,333M
4	New Jersey	New Jersey Turnpike Hudson County Extension	$10.70 Billion	~8.1 mi	$1,321M
5	Connecticut	I-84 Hartford Mobility / Replacement Plan	$5.00 Billion	~4.0 mi	$1,250M
6	New York	I-81 Viaduct Relocation & Grid (Syracuse)	$2.25 Billion	~3.0 mi	$750M
7	Louisiana	I-10 Calcasieu River Bridge Replacement (Lake Charles)	$3.10 Billion	~5.5 mi	$564M
8	Texas	North Houston Highway Improvement Project (I-45)	$13.00 Billion	~24.0 mi	$542M
9	California	Highway 37 (Santa Rosa/Vallejo)	$11.00 Billion	~21.0 mi	$523M
10	Rhode Island	Washington Bridge I-195 Emergency Replacement	$400 Million	~0.8 mi	$500M
11	Wisconsin	I-94 East-West Corridor (Milwaukee)	$1.70 Billion	~3.5 mi	$486M
12	Ohio/Kentucky	Brent Spence Bridge Corridor (OH/KY Shared)	$3.60 Billion	~8.0 mi	$450M
13	Virginia	Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel (HRBT) Expansion	$3.90 Billion	~9.9 mi	$394M
14	Maryland	I-495 & I-270 Capital Beltway Managed Lanes	$1.50 Billion	~4.0 mi	$375M
14	Ohio	I-75 / Brent Spence Bridge Approach (Cincinnati)	$1.80 Billion	~5.0 mi	$360M
15	Alabama	I-10 Mobile River Bridge & Bayway	$3.50 Billion	~10.0 mi	$350M
16	Georgia	I-285 / GA-400 Interchange & Top End Express Lanes	$4.60 Billion	~16.0 mi	$288M
17	South Carolina	I-526 Lowcountry Corridor (Charleston)	$4.00 Billion	~14.0 mi	$286M
18	Nevada	Project Neon / I-15 Trop-LVC Improvement (Las Vegas)	$1.00 Billion	~3.7 mi	$270M
19	Utah	I-15 Expansion & Bottleneck Fix (Salt Lake County)	$3.70 Billion	~17.0 mi	$218M
20	Illinois	Tri-State Tollway (I-294) Expansion	$4.00 Billion	~22.0 mi	$182M
21	Oklahoma	I-44 / I-235 Interchange Expansion (Oklahoma City)	$680 Million	~4.5 mi	$151M
22	Pennsylvania	Mon-Fayette Expressway (PA Route 43 Extension)	$2.10 Billion	~14.0 mi	$150M
23	Arkansas	I-30 Crossing Project (Little Rock)	$1.00 Billion	~7.3 mi	$137M
24	Hawaii	Honolulu Rail/H-1 Corridor Integration	$650 Million	~5.0 mi	$130M
25	Colorado	Central 70 Project (Denver)	$1.20 Billion	~10.0 mi	$120M
26	Tennessee	Choice Lanes Program (I-24 / I-65 Nashville Corridor)	$3.00 Billion	~26.0 mi	$115M
27	Florida	I-4 Ultimate / Beyond the Ultimate Corridor	$2.30 Billion	~21.0 mi	$110M
28	Iowa	I-80 / I-380 System Interchange (Iowa City)	$387 Million	~4.0 mi	$97M
29	North Carolina	Complete 540 / NC 540 Triangle Expressway	$2.20 Billion	~28.0 mi	$79M
30	Michigan	I-75 Modernization (Oakland County)	$1.00 Billion	~18.0 mi	$56M
31	Delaware	U.S. 301 Toll Road Extension	$636 Million	~12.5 mi	$51M
32	New Mexico	I-25 / I-40 “Big I” & South Corridor Upgrades	$250 Million	~5.0 mi	$50M
33	North Dakota	I-94 / I-29 Tri-Level Interchange Rebuild (Fargo)	$95 Million	~2.0 mi	$48M
34	Idaho	I-86 / I-15 System Interchange Rebuild (Pocatello)	$112 Million	~2.5 mi	$45M
35	Maine	I-95 / Hampden Bridge & Corridor Rebuild	$85 Million	~2.0 mi	$43M
36	Minnesota	I-494 Airport to Hwy 169 Corridor	$377 Million	~9.0 mi	$42M
37	New Hampshire	I-93 Widening (Salem to Manchester)	$800 Million	~19.8 mi	$40M
38	Mississippi	I-20 / I-55 West Jackson Corridor Improvements	$180 Million	~4.5 mi	$40M
39	West Virginia	Corridor H (Elkins to WV/VA State Line)	$1.20 Billion	~30.0 mi	$40M
40	Arizona	I-10 Wild Horse Pass Corridor Expansion	$1.00 Billion	~26.0 mi	$39M
41	South Dakota	I-29 / 85th Street Interchange (Sioux Falls)	$65 Million	~2.0 mi	$33M
42	Nebraska	US-77 South Lincoln Beltway	$352 Million	~11.0 mi	$32M
43	Kansas	U.S. 69 Express Lanes (Overland Park Expansion)	$570 Million	~18.0 mi	$32M
44	Vermont	U.S. Route 2 / I-89 Reconfiguration (Chittenden)	$45 Million	~1.5 mi	$30M
45	Alaska	Seward Highway Upgrades (MP 75–90 / MP 100–105)	$380 Million	~20.0 mi	$19M
46	Montana	I-90 Missoula Corridor Reconstruction	$140 Million	~8.0 mi	$18M
47	Indiana	I-69 Finish Line (Evansville to Indianapolis)	$2.00 Billion	~142.0 mi	$14M
48	Missouri	Improve I-70 Statewide Program (3-Lane Expansion)	$2.80 Billion	~200.0 mi	$14M
49	Wyoming	I-80 Elk Mountain / Winter Safety Corridor Upgrades	$85 Million	~15.0 mi	$6M

A few days ago, I published a guest post by Tim Fist and Saif Khan of the Institute for Progress, discussing the question of whether we should deliberately try to slow down the rate of AI progress:

The authors promised a raft of specific policy recommendations, and they didn’t disappoint. Here is part 2, with all of those recommendations. Did you know that 23 is my lucky number?

In our last post, we evaluated the claims of a recent open letter by AI company employees calling for governments to “pace” frontier AI development. To summarize:

Rapid progress towards fully automated AI R&D has empirical support, but it’s less clear how much it will accelerate AI capabilities or pose severe risks.
Despite substantial uncertainty, we believe some preparatory policy action is warranted. This follows both from how serious the possible direct risks are and the risk that political backlash to AI-driven disruptions results in poorly-reasoned policy measures, such as broad bans on new data centers.
If “pacing” becomes necessary, we think it should consist of two parts: first, specifying thresholds for when automated AI R&D is likely to pose severe risks; and second, if a threshold is exceeded, incentivizing AI companies to reallocate resources away from the most risky research, and towards activities that make further automation safer, or diffuse the benefits of existing AI faster.

Without preparation now, however, our preferred pacing strategy will be impossible to implement. In this post, we’ll describe how the US can concretely prepare for the further automation of AI R&D and the risks it entails.

Still, we aren’t certain whether the benefits of pacing outweigh the downsides, especially given the risk that government regulation is implemented counterproductively. So to make policy preparation as targeted and low-regret as possible, we think any intervention should meet the following five criteria:

Target only AI development activities that could lead to serious and irreversible harms.
Minimize any slowdown in the diffusion of existing AI capabilities, and ideally accelerate it.
Impose low costs, or deliver clear benefits, even if automated AI R&D and its attendant risks prove unlikely.
Avoid systematically disadvantaging more cautious labs and countries.
Avoid establishing a new regulatory apparatus that is likely to be misused (e.g., by concentrating power in a small set of companies).

A surprisingly wide range of policy moves meet these criteria. We’ve identified 23 of them, and they span 7 areas:

Transparency: giving the government and public more visibility into automated AI R&D
State capacity: improving the government’s ability to understand and respond to automated AI R&D
Risk management: developing a risk management strategy for automated AI R&D that accelerates defensive and commercial AI use
Verification: accelerating the development of AI verification technologies to enable agreements between mutually distrustful parties
Resilience: accelerating the development of technologies that improve society’s ability to withstand and recover from AI-driven disruptions
Competition with China: extending the US AI lead over China to buy more time to manage risks and increase US leverage in international negotiations
Diplomacy: creating option value for international cooperation to manage the risks of automated AI R&D

In the rest of this post, we’ll explain why we think policy action is justified across each area and give specific recommendations for each. For more details on this and the material from yesterday’s post, you can read our full report here.

Transparency

AI now regularly makes impressive breakthroughs in math and is superhuman at many aspects of software development and cybersecurity, with capabilities doubling every 7 and 5 months, respectively. But outside of frontier AI companies, how exactly the drivers of AI progress — e.g., curating more and better data, improving training algorithms, applying more reinforcement learning, simply making the model bigger — are unlocking AI capabilities is poorly understood.

The same is true for many of the crucial questions surrounding AI R&D automation. Much of the best information remains inside company walls.1 Given that automated R&D could rapidly accelerate AI progress with little warning, this dynamic could leave the government and public unprepared.

It doesn’t have to be this way. If we want society to respond well, we’ll need much more information about what’s going on at the frontier of AI.

More transparency could help us understand the science behind automated AI R&D as well as what it looks like within specific companies (e.g., how much they’re automating, what policies they use to manage the risks, and any R&D-related incidents).

A recent NVIDIA-led letter supported open-weight models from an open science perspective — a valuable goal. But public disclosure practices around the science of and common practices within AI development (for both closed- and open-weight models) are minimal.2 Building on the findings of CSET and the Elasticity Institute, we suggest transparency measures for information in five categories:

The science of general AI progress.3
AI’s ability to automate specific AI R&D tasks.4
Company progress toward automating AI R&D.5
Company AI R&D automation risk management practices and incidents.6
Company “model behavior specifications,” documents that describe the values and principles an AI model is trained to follow (e.g., OpenAI’s Model Spec for its GPT models and Anthropic’s Constitution for its Claude models).7

The vast majority of this information is not subject to disclosure requirements, and so it is either disclosed voluntarily in a limited way or not at all.8 Although some particularly sensitive information may only be suitable for disclosure to the US government, we generally recommend transparency measures that involve public disclosure.

As AI companies automate more of their R&D, this information would enhance public and policymaker understanding, improve policy responses, and enable the broader scientific community to do better work on alignment and security.

1. Frontier AI companies and relevant industry bodies should publicly share information relevant to trends and risks in AI R&D automation

The categories of information outlined above would improve policymakers’ and the public’s understanding of the extent and nature of AI R&D automation at frontier AI companies, enabling outside experts to model, project, and publish on associated trends and impacts. In turn, this would improve policy responses and bolster the broader scientific community’s work on alignment and security.

Disclosing information about the science of AI and general AI capabilities would be a return to the historical norms of open scientific publication in the US AI industry. As recently as 2020, OpenAI published detailed information on the architecture, training recipe, and data of GPT-3, while in 2022, Google published detailed scaling laws showing how training compute, data, and model architecture correlate with AI model capabilities.

To reestablish this norm, employees at frontier AI companies should encourage their leadership to publicly share information in the categories outlined above, and advocate for reestablishing broader industry norms, including through industry bodies such as the Frontier Model Forum.

We believe commercial and geopolitical concerns over the sensitivity of this information are manageable. Industry-level technical metrics related to the science of AI and general AI capabilities are likely well understood by most or all frontier AI companies in the US and China. They are therefore unlikely to alter the balance of AI capabilities between US AI companies and between the US and China. Additionally, specific company-level AI R&D automation activities are of extraordinary public interest, such that improving the US government’s and public’s ability to mount a policy response outweighs concerns over commercial sensitivity. Of course, some specific information on cutting-edge breakthroughs — particularly where non-US companies lack comparable knowledge — will be crucial to US strategic interests and AI leadership, and may thus be less suited to public disclosure.

However, we do not recommend legal mandates requiring disclosure of this information. Legal mandates for public disclosure should focus on information related to risk management, as follows.

2. Congress should legislate transparency about automated AI R&D risk management, incident reporting, whistleblower protections, and model behavior specifications

Several current federal bills include transparency-related requirements for internal deployment:

The FRONTIER Act, introduced in July 2026, includes the following three types of transparency and reporting obligations directly relevant to internally-deployed models (which are often used for automated AI R&D): (1) The developer’s publicly available frontier AI framework must describe how the developer reviews risk assessments in deciding to internally deploy the model; (2) The developer must periodically submit confidential reports to the Department of Commerce containing “a summary of an assessment of catastrophic risks arising from internal use of its frontier models”; and (3) The developer must report, within 72 hours, critical safety incidents involving its frontier models, including whether an incident was associated with internal use.

The AI Incident Reporting Act, introduced in June 2026, would require reports for internal-only AI models, including with respect to an internal model that “when unprompted, has demonstrated the ability to materially accelerate or automate the research, development, evaluation, engineering, or improvement of advanced artificial intelligence systems, including in ways that could significantly compress timelines for the development or deployment of more capable systems.”

Finally, the AI Whistleblower Protection Act, introduced in May 2025, would strengthen protections for whistleblowers regarding risky activities involving AI security vulnerabilities, legal violations, or dangers to public safety, public health, or national security.

The bills described above would be effective in mandating public disclosure of frontier AI frameworks and government disclosure of incident reports for internally deployed models, as well as protecting whistleblowers. New legislation is necessary to mandate disclosure of model behavior specifications. Some bills, such as the FRONTIER Act, include much broader regulatory scope than public disclosure — but discussing those provisions is out of this report’s scope.

State capacity

Right now, the US government lacks the well-resourced institutions required to fully keep up with AI R&D automation, to inform politicians and frontier AI companies on how to respond, or to coordinate a pacing strategy.

However, absent a state authority trusted by society at large, managing the pace of rapid AI capability improvement will be impossible. Only democratically accountable leaders possess the legitimacy and power to coordinate the kind of mass reallocation toward defense and diffusion that may be needed.

The government should therefore build institutions capable of responding effectively to rapid AI progress.9

3. Congress should resource the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) with a budget of at least $84 million per year and empower it to directly advise senior government officials and frontier AI companies

Congress should provide CAISI with the manpower, resources, and autonomy required to generate real situational awareness of AI progress for policymakers and shape frontier AI companies’ technology development and incentives. IFP previously recommended increasing CAISI staff to 184 personnel and giving it a budget of $84 million, and the America First Policy Institute recommended allocating $50–100 million to CAISI per year. This should be considered a minimum bar: developing a strategy for, recognizing the conditions justifying, and managing a coordinated effort to respond to the automation of AI R&D would likely require substantially greater capacity and resources.

More important than size, however, are CAISI’s autonomy and business model: CAISI should have a direct line of communication to a senior White House or cabinet-level official and be able to provide its expertise across the federal government. CAISI should also be empowered to:

Forward deploy its staff into the frontier AI companies, thus increasing the government’s situational awareness of frontier AI companies’ major research projects, internal deployments, and risk management cultures,
Organize a collection of 3rd-party AI evaluators and data producers,
Establish direct contracts with the frontier AI companies to support priority research and security efforts (e.g., compute subsidies for alignment teams, implementation of control and verification technologies, and adoption of more robust model monitoring teams), and
Inform government export control policies on frontier AI products and services.

4. The White House should set clear roles and responsibilities of US government agencies to increase specialization across AI policy

CAISI should be the government’s central hub for AI expertise and evaluation, working with the Department of War, Intelligence Community, and the Department of Energy. Accordingly, the Department of Commerce, where CAISI sits, should serve as the US government’s lead on frontier AI technology, with its primacy clarified in future executive orders.

CAISI would inform the White House’s development of overall frontier AI policy as well as other government agencies’ management of potential domain-specific AI risks. This would include generating evaluations, analyses, and recommendations to enable the CDC’s management of biological risks, the National Security Agency’s (NSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) management of cybersecurity risks, and Treasury’s mitigation of financial risks.

CAISI also benefits from being housed in the Department of Commerce, which has strong AI-relevant technical and policy capacity in National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) labs, the CHIPS Program Office (which has the government’s leading semiconductor expertise), the Bureau of Industry and Security (which handles AI-related export controls), and the International Trade Administration (which houses AI industry analysts).

The Department of War, in particular the NSA, is well-positioned to inform AI company security efforts, drive IT network security and product hardening, and build cross-company hunt infrastructure to track and disrupt AI-driven cyber threats. The NSA should also provide operational data on AI productivity in cryptologic operations to inform CAISI’s understanding of model performance in technical exploitation. Likewise, the Department of the Treasury is well positioned to evaluate and mitigate AI R&D automation risks in the financial services industry.

5. Intelligence agencies should improve their collection and analysis on foreign AI development and counter threats targeting US AI companies

Just as the US government needs visibility into US AI companies’ automated R&D, it has a vital interest in tracking AI R&D activities conducted by companies in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The NSA, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) should therefore dedicate collection resources to PRC regulators, lab executives, research leads, lab IT systems, IT service companies, and semiconductor companies. In particular, these organizations should establish an integrated, colocated mission organization focused on PRC technology targets, with common leadership, entitlements, and IT systems, thereby enabling integrated HUMINT-SIGINT-counterintelligence approaches to the PRC AI industry and associated strategic exploitation targets.

PRC technology analysts across these agencies, as well as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Enterprise, should be awarded entitlements to all raw SIGINT and HUMINT collection derived from PRC technology targets; this democratized access would enable the Intelligence Community’s development of indications and warning analysis as to when PRC AI development poses imminent risks, where semiconductor export controls are being circumvented, and where various risk management commitments are being flouted.

The US Intelligence Community should organize collection and analytic activities to provide this warning to senior government leaders, thereby enabling many of the export control and verification activities proposed below. These agencies should also contract with private-sector AI specialists to augment their analytic workforces, leveraging commercial researchers and technical expertise to improve their understanding of the collection.

As AI research and development is automated, frontier AI companies’ internal model weights and research advances will become increasingly valuable to intelligence services, rival AI companies, and agents that aim to improve their own capabilities or accomplish tasks beyond their current capabilities. The FBI, NSA, and CIA should therefore also partner to better track foreign espionage threats against US AI companies and to improve frontier AI companies’ counterintelligence programs. In doing so, these agencies should partner with the AI companies and their IT service providers to implement more effective application monitoring, information siloing, physical surveillance, and offensive counterintelligence operations to track and mislead industrial espionage campaigns, including those undertaken by AI agents.

The White House should direct these initiatives via a classified national security memorandum. This memorandum should outline key intelligence, operational, and security objectives vis-a-vis the PRC AI industry and protection of US AI technology, direct the establishment of a joint interagency mission organization focused on PRC technology targets, direct the establishment of relevant collection capabilities and IT systems to support related collection and analytic missions, direct the production of indications and warning-focused analysis, and expansion of relevant entitlements to specific populations of analysts.

Risk management

The AI policy community lacks a consensus strategy for managing the risks posed by rapidly improving AI capabilities.10 Given how fast automated AI R&D might improve AI capabilities if it happens, governments and AI companies should develop guidelines for risk management in advance.11

These guidelines would extend today’s efforts to evaluate and establish thresholds for AI safeguards, capabilities, and model releases, helping government and industry have a plan in place for the “day after” explosive growth in capabilities.

6. CAISI should develop guidelines for managing the risks of rapid AI capability improvement

In doing so, it should publicly take input from a range of stakeholders, including:

Leading US AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, SpaceXAI, SSI, and Thinking Machines;
Foreign AI companies;
Key companies across the AI supply chain, including semiconductor companies like NVIDIA; and
Experts from third-party AI evaluation organizations such as METR and Apollo.

Related guidelines should include but not be limited to:

Thresholds for unacceptable risk from an AI system when undertaking automated AI R&D;
“If-then” commitments where reaching a certain capability or risk level triggers a mitigation or release decision;
Specifications of required levels of human oversight during automated R&D as well as inference of continuously learning models;
Preferred alignment and security techniques;
The appropriate resource allocation between capability research and acceleration of techniques for monitoring, control, and alignment;
Preferred capability research pathways that pose less risk; and
Agent monitoring and control specifications, building on ongoing CAISI information gathering.12

Of particular importance are the risk thresholds: within our proposed implementation of “pacing,” their breach would trigger consideration of efforts to reallocate resources away from automated AI R&D, and towards societal resilience (see “Invest in AI resilience” section below), safety research, and AI diffusion.13 The guidelines should also describe how to carry out this reallocation, including plans to reallocate researchers and compute resources and to preserve the commercial viability of AI companies.

Verification

At some point, AI R&D automation might motivate the US to cooperate with other countries on managing its risks. Without an international agreement, regulations on US AI companies could put them at a disadvantage compared to their competitors, particularly Chinese AI companies.

But the economic or national security advantages of continuing to build more powerful AI may produce a strong incentive for each country to defect on any agreement. Preventing this kind of defection without resorting to aggressive measures like large-scale inspections or shutting down data centers would require something new: privacy-preserving verification allowing mutually distrustful parties — such as the US and — China to verify how their AI compute (the chips and data centers that are a necessary condition for developing and deploying frontier AI systems) is being used.

AI chips already include some physical mechanisms that allow them to securely report properties about the code they are running, but these mechanisms could be vastly improved.14 Other verification tech might involve doing “spot checks” on computation,15 using mutually trusted AI systems to inspect sensitive information in a counterparty’s systems,16 or leveraging power meters attached to AI data centers to infer what type of workload is running.17

Better verification technology would allow governments (or AI companies18) to agree to targeted, verifiable, privacy-preserving limits on the most dangerous activities while permitting beneficial AI applications and accelerating their diffusion.

However, no AI verification technology is yet mature. The field is still in its infancy. By some optimistic measures, barely 50 people are working on it worldwide. Making verification feasible therefore requires investment. If the nuclear arms control precedent is any indication, the ability to verify that agreements are being upheld is often necessary for parties to enter into them in the first place. Absent further progress in AI verification technology, “pacing” frontier AI development could become a euphemism for pausing it.

7. CAISI should co-lead an AI Verification Consortium (AIVEC) with industry to prototype and deploy verification technologies

There is currently no organization with a mandate to ensure that AI verification technologies are deployable if they are needed soon. AIVEC would fix that, bringing together the AI industry, philanthropy, and government in a public-private partnership to coordinate funding and drive faster progress on these technologies.

AIVEC would lead and coordinate several activities, including:

Defining clear goals about what properties of AI workloads AIVEC and its constituents want to be able to verify and when those technologies need to be ready.
Roadmapping the technologies and ensuring they are on track to reach those goals on the desired timelines.
Disbursing direct grants to technical teams.
Coordinating the creation of AI hardware testbeds to accelerate R&D cycles.
Launching prize competitions.
Funding and coordinating a buildout of data centers with the capacity for verifiable AI inference.
Making further policy recommendations to the US government and serving as a forum for ongoing communication among frontier AI companies on verification efforts.
Informing diplomatic discussions between the US and foreign governments about possible international agreements and verification measures to support them.

Some of these activities are described in greater detail below: AI hardware testbeds, prize competitions, and the construction of a verifiable AI inference data center.

AIVEC could be structured in a number of ways, with varying government participation and degrees of focus on the activities above. But no matter its structure, AIVEC should be empowered to conduct, fund, and direct the requisite R&D to make compute verification possible.

AIVEC could be set up as a philanthropic project without any government involvement, following the “general manager” model. However, US government involvement will likely be crucial to AIVEC’s success, for three reasons. First, US government leadership may be necessary to secure deep collaboration between the leading AI companies on this topic. Second, the US government can inform which verification targets are necessary for international agreements. Third, US government participation from the start would build confidence in the technology’s viability.19

8. AIVEC should coordinate the creation of AI hardware testbeds and make them available to government, industry, and nonprofit partners

Access to advanced AI hardware is a major bottleneck to rapidly prototyping verification technology. A single state-of-the-art AI server can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and rack-scale systems can cost over $3 million. An ideal prototyping cluster might cost tens of millions.

To accelerate testing cycles, AIVEC should play a coordinating role in setting up hardware testbeds, sourcing in-kind hardware transfers from AI companies and hyperscalers, ensuring alignment among AIVEC partners on testbed specifications, and providing R&D partners with direct access to the testbeds for unimpeded testing and experimentation.

These testbeds will support earlier development phases, enabling R&D teams in industry, government, and the nonprofit sector to prototype, tamper with, and even break verification components. These same testbeds could also eventually be used as small clusters in the adversarial grand challenge detailed in Recommendation 9 below.

9. AIVEC should launch philanthropically funded prize competitions for AI verification headed by CAISI

Prize competitions are effective at incentivizing innovation in technical domains where a clear goal can be specified, but there is no single team or best research approach to fund directly. Unlike direct funding of R&D in high-risk research directions, they enable funders to set ambitious goals without risking significant financial loss. Prizes also increase the prestige of working on specific problems, attract talent, and help build expertise in new and important technical fields.

The 2010 America COMPETES reauthorization Act authorizes the heads of federal agencies to create prize competitions, in which a reward (usually cash) is offered to participants to achieve a specific goal. These competitions can be administered by — and the rewards can be supplied by — private, nonprofit entities.20

Verification prizes may be run, administered, and adjudicated by AIVEC and CAISI, a nonprofit partner, or a CAISI-appointed panel of technical experts, and funded by philanthropic donations and/or funds from Federal agencies.

We recommend two different versions of prize competitions, which differ mainly in their complexity and funding requirements: lightweight, well-specified prizes that can be launched quickly and gather responses from a broad range of actors; and a grand challenge that involves fewer participants but provides them with R&D budgets, full access to hardware testbeds, and built-in adversarial dynamics.

Lightweight prize competitions

Not all AI verification problems have clear, fully specifiable goals. But some of them do. Potential initial verification targets include workload classification from telemetry21 and accelerated cryptographic proofs of AI workloads.22

AIVEC should coordinate the launch of a series of well-specified, philanthropically funded prize competitions for these domains of AI verification.

These prizes would not provide continuous hardware access or upfront funding, so they would require no participation downselection or in-kind transfers from industry. Funders can simply specify a problem and pay whoever credibly solves it.

An adversarial grand challenge

In addition to the lower-overhead prizes described above, AIVEC could coordinate a more ambitious adversarial grand challenge that provides real hardware to top teams, simulates agreements between them on how to use their compute, and incentivizes them to innovate in adversarially robust verification technology with a series of prizes.23

Any agreement that requires verification technology will, by definition, have strong incentives for both sides to defect, including by tampering with the verification technology. So just like software developers, compute verification developers will have to continually refine their safeguards against new exploits. Verification would therefore benefit from pilot deployments that allow for realistic stress tests.

The verification grand challenge could be structured as follows:24

AIVEC gathers input from frontier AI companies and national governments on the kinds of agreements that may be useful in the future, if automated R&D leads to a pacing strategy being pursued.
AIVEC opens a call for teams to participate in the competition. These could be national AI institutes (US CAISI, UK AISI, etc.), AI companies, or others.
The teams submit their proposed verification systems, which are then evaluated, down-selected, and conceptually red-teamed by a panel of judges and expert evaluators.25 The top projects enter the competition.
Build a series of small clusters with in-kind transfers from industry, potentially funded by philanthropy.
Give each team full access to one of these small (e.g., <1 MW) clusters, where they are expected to run real AI workloads (training, reinforcement learning, or inference).
Iterate on a series of mock agreements between the participants, based on the earlier input from frontier AI companies and national governments.26
Set a series of prizes to incentivize teams to defect on the mock agreements without being caught by other participants or to provide proof that other participants defected.

Participants should have full access to their clusters, and be allowed to provide access to other groups as they see fit. Participants should also be encouraged to develop hardware or software verification technologies using a budget allocated to them and to deploy these technologies without restriction on their own clusters — or, if agreed by both parties, on others’ clusters.

This would essentially be a more structured version of the earlier recommendation of lightweight prize competitions, but with built-in simulated adversarial dynamics, upfront R&D budgets for the teams, and full hardware access.

The adversarial dynamic would be key to triggering a race to the top in AI verification, as well as simulating some of the real-life adversarial conditions that these verification measures may need to overcome.27

10. AIVEC should coordinate the construction of a fully verifiable data center

Hardware testbeds and prize competitions can produce verification components and reveal their weaknesses, but they will not necessarily demonstrate how these components integrate into a data center capable of running verifiable frontier workloads at acceptable cost.

AIVEC should coordinate industry, hyperscalers, and nonprofit partners to build a pilot verifiable data center. The goal would be to align AIVEC members on a complete reference architecture and demonstrate viability in the real world at a reasonable cost. Given the technology’s early stage, a complete prototype will likely require iteration across a series of pilot projects. For a vision of what a Focused Research Organization focused on verification might look like, see Faster AI Diffusion Through Hardware-Based Verification.

A key part of this project’s success will be incorporating red-teaming by the Intelligence Community and other top-tier operators to identify ways that these verification methods could be evaded.

11. DARPA and the NSF should set up AI verification R&D programs

Most promising verification technologies have not yet been turned into working prototypes. This is an urgent problem with national security implications, and is too far from commercialization for industry to solve on its own.28

DARPA should run a verification program to build end-to-end prototypes that enable AI companies to make verifiable claims about how their compute is being used, in a way that is privacy-preserving, IP-protecting, and secure against adversarial exploitation. This would follow the precedent of ARPA’s Project Vela, a project to verify Soviet Union compliance with the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty for nuclear weapons testing.

The NSF should fund the underlying science that will enable breakthroughs in verification. Two possible vehicles to achieve this include cooperative agreements with industry and NSF X-Labs. The X-Labs initiative is meant to support organizations built to “address technical challenges and bottlenecks that university and industry labs cannot easily solve through traditional methods.”29 Much of the required work in AI verification relies on infrastructure that is too expensive for individual university labs, and has no clear commercialization potential.

These programs would be complementary to the recommendations above. The urgency of advancing compute verification technology means we should be willing to make multiple parallel bets to achieve the goal of usable prototypes. While AIVEC may be best suited to leverage industry funding and frontier AI expertise, it may not be as well positioned to tap into DARPA’s deep national security expertise or the NSF’s interdisciplinary networks of scientific collaboration.

If and when the technologies do have commercialization potential, Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants may be used by either agency to support startups building in the space before their products are commercially viable.30

12. Intelligence agencies should develop and operationalize unilateral means of AI compute monitoring

Technical means of AI verification can only work if the parties interested in engaging in verifiable agreements have high confidence that their counterparty does not have large data centers that have not been reported (and thus cannot be verified).

Moreover, rapid AI progress may mean that US AI companies or the US government will seek to strike deals to manage the risks of sudden AI R&D automation before the targeted verification technologies described above are developed. In that case, intelligence agencies will probably need to play a large role in being able to certify that their counterparty is complying with the agreement.31

US intelligence agencies should thus prioritize gaining visibility into where foreign competitors have large quantities of compute and how that compute is being used, similar to how the Intelligence Community tracks fissile material to support the International Atomic Energy Agency’s investigations. This could be achieved through SIGINT and HUMINT, satellite imagery and infrared sensing, and AI chip supply-chain intelligence and accounting.

AI resilience

A world more resilient to AI disruptions is possible. If, at the beginning of this year, codebases had been highly secure and cybersecurity experts across industry and government had been able to rapidly patch newly discovered vulnerabilities, the public release of Anthropic’s Claude Fable might not have prompted deployment restrictions by the US government.

We can make that hypothetical a reality by investing in AI resilience: the ability to withstand and recover from major AI-driven disruptions. If automated AI R&D presents serious risks, improving AI resilience could increase the point at which pacing the frontier would be required.

As recent incidents show, AI resilience is a worthwhile goal even at today’s levels of AI capability. Restricting access to closed US frontier models would only be a temporary solution. Based on historical trends, Chinese and open-weight AI models lag the frontier by around 8 months. That means a model with the capabilities of Claude Mythos will likely be widely deployable by Chinese organizations by the end of 2026, giving the US around 4 months to build resilience against the new risks this introduces.

13. NSA, CAISI, CISA, and ONCD should further invest in cybersecurity resilience

AI cyber capabilities are doubling roughly every 5 months, making cybersecurity an ongoing battle between offense and defense. This requires sustained investment in cyber resilience. The NSA, CAISI, CISA, and ONCD should plan for the moment when Mythos-class models are developed and deployed by Chinese organizations, as well as open-sourced.32

Measures to increase cybersecurity must span the relevant attack surface. Promising proposals include:

“Operation Patchlight”: A more ambitious version of Anthropic’s Project Glasswing and OpenAI’s Daybreak, Operation Patchlight would use frontier AI to find and patch open-source code vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them by giving AI-powered security tools and free compute access to critical infrastructure defenders. A 3-year national effort coordinating AI companies, code maintainers, and industry could help shift the advantage to defense. This approach could also be extended to harden closed-source critical infrastructure code.
“The Great Refactor”: AI could automatically translate hundreds of millions of lines of insecure critical open-source code into memory-safe Rust, which would eliminate whole classes of vulnerabilities. This project could be set up as a Focused Research Organization to systematically secure high-impact libraries before 2030 and save billions in cybersecurity costs.
“Preventing AI Sleeper Agents”: The Departments of War and Commerce could create an AI Security Office to red-team and blue-team the full American AI tech stack against sleeper-agent risks.33 This effort could launch as a pilot to evaluate leading AI companies and develop prevention tools; if successful, it could grow into a large-scale national security program.
Proactive forensic-depth AI cybersecurity: AI could automate digital forensics and threat hunting to turn forensic-depth cybersecurity from a post-breach service into an always-on detection method.34 More broadly, advanced AI systems can be used to identify and defeat tradecraft for, develop capabilities within, and operate cybersecurity monitoring systems. Philanthropists, cybersecurity companies, and the NSA can fund AI-driven improvements to these cybersecurity systems, including AI-developed YARA rules for firewalls, more realistic honeypotting systems, and network device monitoring systems.
Cross-company internet hunt architecture: Internet, cloud, financial, and cybersecurity service providers can share telemetry and build federated analytics systems to track AI cyber campaigns across thousands of targets. The relevant data-sharing, collaborative analytic, and operational mitigation systems for this national hunt architecture do not yet exist, but IT service providers could work with NSA or CISA to build them.
Hardening of strategic exploitation targets: Cloud, internet, and IT companies with large credential repositories, as well as managed service providers, are frequently compromised to enable downstream access to thousands of targets; advanced AI systems will enable these exploitation operations at enormous scale. AI and cybersecurity companies could partner with prioritized strategic exploitation targets to harden their core networking infrastructure (e.g., by implementing more secure hypervisors), thereby frustrating efforts to compromise downstream targets.

14. Congress, OSTP and the CDC should invest in biosecurity resilience

We should prepare for a future in which AI could lower the barriers to creating biological threats. Whether AI will meaningfully aid novices in creating biological weapons is hotly debated, and the measured effect was not significant as of mid-2025. But frontier models have continued to improve on every biology benchmark, including those measuring the tacit knowledge required for benchwork troubleshooting. Even if we are not certain, it is worth building resilience now for a world in which AI enhances bioweapon creation, since defenses will take time to build.

Biosecurity is uniquely difficult because bioattacks and biodefenses scale asymmetrically. There is a massive offensive advantage: compared with defenses such as pathogen-agnostic detection and medical countermeasures, attacks take less time to deploy, cost less, and benefit more from advances in AI. Broadly, attacks are relatively more bottlenecked by information and tacit knowledge, while defenses are relatively more bottlenecked by physical properties, such as manufacturing capacity and physical infrastructure. By removing friction in accessing information, including tacit knowledge, AI is poised to accelerate attackers’ progress more than defenders’.

The US should therefore build a strong defense to prevent, detect, and defend against biological threats. We recommend:

Prevent dangerous biological threats from being created and released: Congress should secure the DNA supply chain, such as by passing the Biosecurity Modernization and Innovation amendment as part of the American Biotechnology Competitiveness Act, requiring DNA synthesis providers to screen customers and orders while minimizing burdens on legitimate research. Congress should also equip CAISI to evaluate new models for biological risks and to develop safeguards standards to reduce dangerous uplift without degrading legitimate use. Finally, OSTP should coordinate NIH and NIST pilots of tiered access controls for narrow subsets of pathogen data most likely to enable misuse and provide the gene synthesis screening framework requested in Executive Order 14292.
Detect threats before they spread widely: The CDC should invest $80M annually in a federal pathogen early-warning system, adding metagenomic sequencing to existing traveler, wastewater, and clinical surveillance networks, so the US can rapidly detect novel biological threats. Using the resulting information, the Defense Innovation Unit should continue to fund the development of better AI tools capable of scanning these billions of data points for emerging threats, and explore new options for better biosurveillance.
Defend the population and shorten the path out of the pandemic: Congress should sustainably fund the Strategic National Stockpile to grow and maintain day-zero reserves of respirators and medical countermeasures for future pandemics. Congress should also sustainably fund warm-base manufacturing capacity to ensure that we are prepared to rapidly manufacture countermeasures for novel threats. The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) should provide advance purchase commitments for broad-spectrum antivirals. The Department of Health and Human Services should fund large-scale trials of air-cleaning technologies, such as Far-UVC and glycol vapors, and recommend evidence-based updates to ASHRAE Standard 241. Finally, Congress should provide incentives for buildings to procure these air-cleaning technologies.

Many more projects should be undertaken in biosecurity,35 as well as in other critical areas.36 This list is far from exhaustive. IFP is currently developing more concrete project proposals to increase AI resilience as part of The Launch Sequence.

Competition with China

AI chips are America’s asymmetric advantage. Unlike for algorithms and training data — the other key inputs to AI — policy can durably shape access to the large amounts of computing power needed to develop and deploy frontier systems.37 Due to compute export controls, US companies currently access approximately 10x more AI compute than Chinese companies,38 enabling US AI model capabilities to be approximately 8 months ahead of China’s. However, this lead could be much larger.

Increasing the lead would have multiple benefits. It would allow the US to simultaneously maintain long-term AI leadership while addressing the risks of automating AI R&D. It would buy more time to build AI resilience. And it would give the US greater leverage in any international negotiations about AI risks.

The US can increase its lead, potentially to over 2 years, by increasing its AI compute advantage, addressing adversarial distillation, preventing theft of US model weights, and making it easier to build AI data centers at home. If the US adopted the tighter AI chip and semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME) export controls described below, its compute advantage could be well over 100x, adding several months to the lead. If the US countered adversarial distillation — the process by which Chinese AI companies train their models on the outputs of US models — it could add approximately another 7 months to the lead, per an industry estimate. And protecting US model weights from theft would ensure that China cannot quickly erase the lead.

15. Congress and the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) should strengthen controls on US and allied semiconductor manufacturing equipment

Existing SME controls have already been highly effective, establishing a 50–100x US advantage over China in the production of aggregate AI computing power. But gaps in SME controls could limit long-term effectiveness and prevent the US lead from being even larger, as even China’s limited existing production has relied on US and allied SME allowed into China.

The bipartisan MATCH Act, currently slated to be included in the must-pass yearly National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), would require the Administration to negotiate with allied governments or otherwise implement unilateral controls to close key remaining gaps. Most importantly, the MATCH Act would mandate China-wide controls on all deep-ultraviolet (DUV) immersion equipment. Such equipment represents the most significant chokepoint in making AI chips and is still not restricted China-wide. BIS can also tighten these controls with its existing authorities.

16. Congress and BIS should close gaps in AI chip controls

The US compute production advantage of 50–100x has translated to only a 10x compute access advantage because the US has allowed China to access chips in four ways.

The US has approved sales of powerful US AI chips to China, including the NVIDIA H200.
The US has insufficiently restrained Chinese smuggling of restricted US AI chips.
The US is choosing not to enforce regulations that limit leading US and allied chip foundries, such as TSMC and Samsung, from producing AI chips for potential Chinese cutouts in third countries.
The US allows leading Chinese AI companies to legally access the most powerful US AI chips via cloud services. The White House has asserted the best current Chinese AI model — Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 — was trained on cutting-edge NVIDIA GB300s accessed via cloud services in Thailand.

The Trump Administration, via BIS, should close gaps in these controls. Additionally, Congress should legislate to preserve the US compute advantage. Specifically, Congress should pass the AI OVERWATCH Act, which would codify restrictions on exports to China of the most advanced US AI chips, such as the NVIDIA GB300. Congress should also pass the Chip Security Act, which would mandate privacy-preserving location verification of AI chips to prevent smuggling. Stronger location verification can also enable more exports to ally and partner countries, accelerating faster AI diffusion while reducing smuggling risk. Due to supply constraints, every chip sold to China reduces the number of chips US organizations can deploy to maintain the US lead and deploy AI in defensive applications.

17. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Department of Justice (DOJ), BIS, CAISI, and Congress should help industry counter adversarial distillation of US AI model capabilities

Adversarial distillation enables Chinese AI companies to extract capabilities from frontier US AI models while using very little of their own compute, instead free-riding on the compute-intensive “reinforcement learning” steps required for training US frontier models. We recommend the following actions to help counter adversarial distillation:

First, BIS should prioritize export controls on AI chips and SME described in Recommendations 15 and 16. Beyond reducing China’s ability to train large, powerful AI models, compute controls also limit China’s ability to benefit from adversarially distilling US models. The smaller a Chinese AI model is relative to a large US teacher model, the less able it is to benefit from distillation of the US model.

Second, the FTC and DOJ should provide guidance providing antitrust safe harbors for industry threat intelligence sharing, building on 2014 guidance on safe harbors for cybersecurity threat information sharing. Additionally, Congress should codify such a safe harbor, such as by passing the Collaboration on Adversarial Threats and Security Risks Act. However, before passage, we recommend adding language to the bill confirming that any legal cause of action “shall be promptly dismissed” if the collaboration falls within the safe harbor. Currently, the bill provides a safe harbor only as an affirmative defense, which likely would be raised only after substantial litigation discovery. This could chill use of the safe harbor.

Third, CAISI should establish a public-private partnership to develop guidelines to raise the floor of industry-wide safeguards to combat adversarial distillation.

18. BIS should maintain visibility into sales of US chips

With tightened SME controls that ensure virtually all AI chips are produced by US chipmakers, BIS should ensure that the chipmakers maintain visibility into customers to confirm that chips do not fall into the hands of irresponsible or untrusted parties over which it is more difficult to practice oversight. BIS can then gather this information to maintain an AI chip registry, which also supports verification and intelligence collection activities described above.

19. DOW, the IC, CAISI, and relevant Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) should establish consensus security guidelines for protecting model weights from theft and prototype them in a government facility

Consistent with the July 2025 AI Action Plan, CAISI and NSA should develop guidelines for industry to protect AI model weights from exfiltration by adversaries, including nation-state actors, particularly to reach Security Level 4 (SL-4) or SL-5. (Helpfully, RAND has already developed guidelines for SL-4 and SL-5 data centers.) Stealing AI model weights is currently possible for well-resourced state-backed actors and leading cyber-capable institutions. Compared to the model outputs obtainable via distillation, the model weights themselves are the crown jewels, and AI companies are not currently able to prevent their exfiltration. If American AI companies train an AI model capable of fully automated AI R&D, foreign adversaries will likely prioritize obtaining the model weights, as they could use them to automate training their own models.

The DOW, NSA, other IC agencies, CAISI, and relevant FFRDCs such as RAND should also prototype an SL-4 or SL-5 cluster for sensitive government applications. Having such a cluster available would allow highly sensitive model weights developed by industry to be transferred to a much more secure facility, if the situation demands it.39

A pilot phase could involve designing and building a secure inference data center through in-kind hardware transfers from leading American AI companies, chipmakers, or hyperscalers. RAND estimates the cost of such a data center to be $37–50 million for a proof-of-concept facility and $277–345 million for an enterprise-scale version.40

*Illustrative diagram adapted from Lennart Heim, 2024, A Trusted AI Compute Cluster for AI Verification and Evaluation.*

Eventually, this secure data center model should be scaled up to enable larger-scale secure deployments, e.g., to support preemptive cyberdefense programs that patch critical infrastructure such as Project Glasswing and Daybreak. For specific recommendations on how the US government can achieve this, see A Sprint Toward Security Level 5.

This cluster would also provide better protections against incidents such as an unreleased OpenAI model’s recent autonomous cyberattack on AI infrastructure company HuggingFace.41 Within a secure cluster, future models could be evaluated with less risk of them escaping containment, which is particularly useful if they are developed with minimal human supervision via automated AI R&D.42

20. Congress should ensure the US has sufficient electrical capacity to sustain AI leadership

To maintain and increase America’s AI compute lead over China, we need electricity to power data centers.

The Electric Power Research Institute now projects that data centers could consume 9 to 17 percent of US electricity by 2030, up from 4 to 5 percent in 2024 and that by 2030 a single model training run could require between 4 and 14 GW. After two decades of static electricity demand, utilities and regulators must suddenly accommodate enormous new loads.

Our regulatory and permitting systems are not equipped to handle this new growth. Connecting AI data centers to the grid will require both new power plants and new transmission lines. Generation and transmission projects take many years to permit and reach operation; for instance, a Department of Energy review found that new transmission projects take about ten years on average to plan, permit, and build. But these are policy choices, not physical limits.

By contrast, China has a much larger power system and is expanding it much faster. China generated more than twice as much electricity as the US did last year, up from parity in 2010.

In 2025, China added more than 430 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity, and is on track to add similar amounts in coming years, essentially adding the nameplate capacity of the entire US grid every few years.

Congress should treat electrical capacity as part of the country’s AI industrial base. It should pursue four related reforms.

First, Congress should fix the broken interconnection process for both generators and large electricity users. The Grid Connection and Congestion Management Act provides a model for generator interconnection. It would allow generators to accept curtailment during congestion rather than wait for every transmission upgrade required to guarantee firm delivery. Congress should also create a parallel national framework for large loads. In June 2026, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) ordered all six regional grid operators under its jurisdiction to justify or reform their rules governing service for flexible large loads. Congress should confirm FERC’s authority over large-load interconnection, codify minimum rules for study timelines, cost responsibility, co-location, and expedited service for curtailable loads, and extend equivalent requirements to regions without an independent grid operator.

Second, Congress should make commonsense reforms to the permitting system that governs infrastructure broadly. Laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, National Historic Preservation Act, and Clean Water Act could be streamlined without compromising their important substantive goals. Further, Congress should limit the executive branch’s power to disrupt already permitted projects through permitting certainty legislation like the bipartisan FREEDOM Act.

Third, Congress should reform transmission siting and funding. A high-voltage transmission line that serves several states should not be blocked because one state counts only the costs within its borders and ignores regional benefits. The Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 and the SPEED and Reliability Act provide models. Both would remove the Department of Energy corridor-designation process that now limits FERC’s backstop authority, allow developers to seek a FERC permit after states have had a year to act, and require the beneficiaries of federally permitted transmission to bear its costs. Several other pending bills supply provisions worth incorporating, including the FASTER Act, which would make FERC the lead permitting agency for qualifying projects, as FERC is for natural gas projects, and the BIG WIRES Act, which requires linking interregional grids.

Congress should also authorize a Grid Infrastructure Fund whereby participating data center developers would pay the cost of serving their loads and contribute to an insurance pool that protects ratepayers if a promised facility is not built after the infrastructure to connect it has been built. In exchange, the Fund would aggregate demand and equipment purchases, use federal credit to lower financing costs, and coordinate investment in transmission, generation, and domestic grid equipment manufacturing. A fund backed only by hyperscalers could mobilize an estimated $15 to 25 billion over five years, and federal lending authority and private co-investment could make it substantially larger.

Fourth, Congress should invest where private capital cannot absorb early-stage risk. The Department of Energy’s $2.5 billion Transmission Facilitation Program has supported nearly 1,000 miles and 7.1 gigawatts of new transmission capacity by acting as a guaranteed customer for projects that may otherwise not be economical to finance. Congress should expand this model and pair it with federal credit reconductoring. The bipartisan REWIRE Act of 2026 would speed permitting for advanced transmission upgrades and incentivize their deployment. Congress should also use Defense Production Act and Office of Energy Dominance Financing authorities to expand domestic production of transformers, switchgear, high-voltage cable, and turbines, building on prior proposals to fund grid equipment manufacturing under DPA Title III.

21. Congress should ensure data centers can be constructed in America

Continued AI leadership will require new data centers. Opposition to data centers has the potential to constrain US AI leadership and relatively advantage our strategic rivals, putting the US in a worse position to negotiate with them on managing automated AI R&D risks.

A supermajority of Americans, in a recent Gallup poll, report opposing an AI data center in their area. At least dozens of projects worth billions of dollars were blocked or delayed during the first quarter of 2026. Fourteen states and numerous localities are considering statewide moratorium proposals. New York has paused permits for new hyperscale data centers. Even Texas recently halted new grid approvals pending an audit. Multiple senators have proposed federal moratoria.

Instead of moratoria on new data centers, Congress should pass new legislation that balances the need to build strategically important infrastructure with the concerns of the host communities, ensuring a transparent and positive-sum result so that the country and localities both benefit from investment in AI infrastructure.

Specifically, Congress should pass legislation that provides for the creation of special industrial zones in communities that “opt in” and, in exchange, receive legally guaranteed community benefits.43 Such a bill should establish a transparent and public process through which a zone could be designated, following approval by the state and affected local governments. Federal agencies could then assess proposed zones for energy availability, security, and environmental suitability before selecting them. Selected zones would receive statutorily expedited, programmatic permitting.

Before receiving expedited treatment, developers would negotiate enforceable agreements with host communities. Benefits could include direct payments, guaranteed property-tax revenue, infrastructure improvements, apprenticeships, school funding, or compute access for local institutions like universities. Congress should also fund independent technical assistance so that small and rural jurisdictions can evaluate proposals and negotiate on equal footing with developers. Developers would be legally required to build, bring, or buy sufficient new generation; fund necessary grid upgrades; and make long-term financial commitments that protect customers from stranded costs, consistent with the White House’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge.

Diplomacy

Currently, the US AI capability lead is only about 8 months. Even if the US used all the policy tools at its disposal to extend its lead to over two years, that lead would still be fragile because the weights of the leading AI model could always be stolen. Ultimately, rapid progress in training compute efficiency — which may be increasing at a rate of 10x per year or more — suggests that new high-risk AI capabilities will eventually diffuse widely.44 At that point, Chinese AI companies may face the same risks as US developers.

If the risks of AI R&D automation materialize in either country, they would not be held back by national borders. At that point, it would be in the interest of both countries to cooperate.

It is therefore valuable to lay the foundation for future international cooperation on addressing the risks posed by AI R&D automation. While there will be challenges to US-China cooperation on AI, the US and the Soviet Union managed to cooperate on nuclear non-proliferation during the Cold War (in part thanks to zero-trust verification methods) even as they competed in other domains.

22. The US government should use its bilateral AI dialogue with China to jointly develop guidelines for managing risks from rapid AI capability growth and prepare verification measures

The Trump Administration’s September 2026 AI risk dialogue presents an opportunity for preparatory work in case a substantial increase in AI risks from increasing AI R&D automation ever occurs. At the dialogue, the US and China should discuss two areas particularly relevant to AI R&D automation risks.

First, the US and China can agree to develop and harmonize guidelines for automated AI R&D risk management. There is precedent for such an agreement; both US and Chinese AI companies signed the Frontier AI Safety Commitments at the AI Seoul Summit in 2024.

Second, to inform their respective domestic development of verification technologies (as discussed above), the US and China can begin discussions on which technologies they would use and in what contexts (e.g., bilateral or third-party auditing).

23. Countries with national AI institutes should collaborate on automated AI R&D risk management guidelines and technical capacity for AI verification

While the US and China are the most crucial countries in managing risks from AI R&D automation, other countries also have an important role to play. For one, AI capabilities will proliferate widely, meaning third-country AI developers will eventually be able to build increasingly advanced AI systems of their own. For another, both US and Chinese developers use large amounts of AI compute in third countries; these resources cannot be ignored in a verification arrangement.

The International Network for Advanced AI Measurement, Evaluation, and Science, whose members all have a national AI institute,45 should cooperate with other countries that have also established similar institutes, such as China, to harmonize risk management guidelines and verification techniques. Countries with a national AI institute are best positioned to contribute to these tasks with technical expertise. Once these countries set best practices, they can engage with broader multilateral groups to encourage wider adoption.

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AI companies have begun disclosing early indications of AI R&D automation, but these are insufficient for properly understanding the drivers of the overall trends.

Though, we draw a distinction between open scientific practices, where information about AI development is published, versus open-weight models, where the model weights are published. These are separate issues with separate sets of benefits and drawbacks.

Metrics could include performance of internally deployed AI systems on long time-horizon tasks as well as messy tasks that are difficult to characterize and train on, improvements in continual learning and sample efficiency, the viability of simulated environments for developing capabilities in non-AI domains, general scaling laws mapping resource usage to capability improvements (such as for RLVR), the relative contributions of different factors to AI progress (including pre-training, post-training such as RLVR, algorithmic improvements, data improvements, distillation, and scaffolding), and optimal theoretical compute and resource allocations (e.g., between pre-training, RLVR, other post-training techniques, non-training R&D activities such as generating synthetic data and designing experiments, and commercial inference).

Metrics could include benchmarking for AI R&D-specific tasks, such as:

Software and hardware engineering, such as coding, debugging, efficiency improvements, and chip design and manufacturing;
Generating ideas for and running experiments, including generating and prioritizing among hypotheses, data gathering, implementation, and analysis of results; and
Strategy for and management of R&D tasks, including setting high-level team direction, prioritizing tasks for each team member, and coordinating tasks.

Metrics could include:

How employment of human R&D staff and AI usage for AI R&D are changing over time, as well as ratios of compute usage for running AI-designed experiments versus human-designed experiments;
The scale and sophistication of tasks delegated to AI, including the frequency of human review or intervention per task type;
The differences in capability and benchmark performance across all metrics between publicly-deployed and internally-deployed models;
Which tasks are involved in AI R&D;
How quickly each company’s AI models are progressing in capability over time and the rates of discoveries;
including a breakdown of the drivers of that progress measured in units of “effective compute” and its components (pre-training, post-training such as RLVR, algorithmic improvements, data improvements, distillation, and scaffolding);
What data is used to train models;
Company breakdowns in actual compute usage across tasks (e.g., between pre-training, RLVR, other post-training techniques, non-training R&D activities, and commercial inference); and
Qualitative impressions from AI researchers.

These include risk management frameworks companies have developed, specific actions that companies are taking to implement them, and incidents arising from substantial AI R&D automation.

These documents are relevant to understanding the alignment and behavior of a model when it is performing AI R&D.

There are minimal public disclosure requirements for categories #1–3 under US federal or state law. In January 2024, the US government invoked the Defense Production Act to privately gather relevant information on frontier US AI development and issued a proposed rule to codify an ongoing reporting requirement that September. However, the rule was never finalized. California AB13 includes limited requirements to publish training data documentation.

Some state laws apply to category #4, such as California’s SB-53 and New York’s RAISE Act. These laws require frontier AI companies to publish frontier AI frameworks that apply to internally deployed AI models, though these do not require any disclosures specific to automated R&D, including useful proxy signals for oversight. For example, neither law would have required OpenAI to disclose a recent incident where its monitoring and control measures were insufficient to prevent an internally deployed model from accessing the open internet and hacking into other companies’ systems. SB-53 also includes whistleblower protections that could apply to automated AI R&D activities when an employee reasonably believes that such activities create a catastrophic danger or violate the law.

Our recommendations would improve the government’s ability to respond to a variety of AI risks beyond fully automated AI R&D.

Several companies have issued frontier AI frameworks in compliance with US state laws, including California’s SB 53 and New York’s RAISE Act. However, the government and frontier AI companies have not specified or agreed on any risk management guidelines relevant to an automated AI R&D-driven capabilities explosion.

We are not arguing that the automation of AI research currently justifies the implementation of such an approach, nor are we recommending that the government and AI companies commit to the execution of a particular set of guidelines.

Separate from proposals related to automated AI R&D, guidelines could also cover misuse generally, building on 2025 CAISI draft guidelines on misuse.

These thresholds could be specific to the pace and shape of automated AI R&D itself, such as model improvements above a threshold level of capability improvement over time (e.g., covering reasoning performance improvements for unsaturated benchmarks across model iterations). Alternatively, they could be defined in relation to particular risks. A relevant threshold for action to mitigate cyber risks, for example, might be an AI system’s development of computationally-efficient cryptanalytic exploitation algorithms effective against a major widely deployed encryption system (e.g., RSA or AES). A threshold for biological risks might be an AI system’s use to design and manufacture an effective biological weapon that is producible using lower than some threshold level of investment in commercially available equipment. A threshold for misalignment might be tethered to internal lab evaluations; alternatively, it could be linked to a misalignment incident (or series of incidents) that causes (or collectively cause) some threshold level of harm over a period of time. We list these options illustratively and not as actual proposals for thresholds.

Verification mechanisms in this category could include more robust versions of NVIDIA’s existing Confidential Computing stack. For more, see this report.

This verification approach would automatically re-run a small subset of the workloads from a counterparty’s data center to ensure they match what is expected, without gaining access to sensitive workload data. This follows the same logic as tax audits: one need not audit every receipt because the mere possibility of being audited is an effective deterrent. Also known as recomputation-based methods.

This verification approach would use a trusted AI system to inspect sensitive information in a counterparty’s systems, answer with the minimal necessary information (e.g., “the agreement was not breached”), and then wipe its memory. A naive implementation of AI inspectors could lack robustness (e.g., to jailbreaks prepared by the counterparty). It may be possible to surmount these challenges through a variety of methods, but this method is likely to be a constant cat-and-mouse game. A robust AI verification regime would involve more than just one of these methods, and seek agreement between their outputs. See: Enabling Verifiably-Scoped Monitoring through Large Language Models and Trusted Compute.

This verification approach is called “AI data center metering.” It is also referred to as “off-chip,” since the technology that does not need to be developed by or integrated by AI chip producers.

Beyond enabling efforts to coordinate the pacing of AI R&D automation, verification technology can enable frontier AI companies to coordinate on a broad range of security measures that are individually too costly but collectively worthwhile. For example, companies could verify, in a privacy-preserving way, that certain dual-use data (e.g., gain-of-function virology research) is not being used to train frontier models, if such a measure proves effective.

It is possible that US government involvement in verification technology R&D would decrease foreign governments’ confidence in it. In an ideal case, different national governments would be involved in, or at least have visibility into, the R&D programs that create verification technology as a confidence-building measure. However, the urgency of developing this technology likely makes setup speed more important than international buy-in.

15 U.S.C. § 3719: ADMINISTERING THE COMPETITION.—“The head of an agency may enter into an agreement with a private, nonprofit entity to administer a prize competition…”
15 U.S.C. § 3719(m)(1): “IN GENERAL.—Support for a prize competition under this section, including financial support for the design and administration of a prize or funds for a monetary prize purse, may consist of Federal appropriated funds and funds provided by the private sector for such cash prizes. The head of an agency may accept funds from other Federal agencies to support such competitions. The head of an agency may not give any special consideration to any private sector entity in return for a donation.”

Given power, utilization, GPU utilization, temperature, etc. from a data center, determine what broad workload it ran (e.g., pre-training, inference, RL). Early evidence suggests this may be trivial absent intentional obfuscation, so the prizes should focus on submissions that demonstrate robust tamper-resistance.

Zero-knowledge proofs can verify, for example, that a specific AI model generated a specific output without revealing any sensitive information, but at unacceptably high performance overheads. Prizes could incentivize innovation in cryptographic methods of AI compute verification at overhead costs acceptable for frontier workloads. The industry-funded ZPrize competitions demonstrate a useful precedent: they distributed over $4M for speeding up zero-knowledge cryptography, producing average performance gains ranging 2.3x–11.3x and up to 150x in one category. All submissions are open-sourced.

Providing hardware drives most of the added complexity: continuous access to expensive clusters requires down-selecting to a handful of teams, in-kind transfers from industry, and significant funding.

This idea is being developed by Lucid Computing and others.

Conceptual red-teaming would allow downselection from a large pool of potential competitors, might inform how you build the clusters in the first place, and it can surface certain limits of implementations that red teaming won’t. For example, if a verification system could be compromised by blackmailing an employee or backdooring the hardware, actual red teaming probably will not reveal that — but conceptual evaluation might.

For example: “only inference is allowed, not pre-training,” “no inference on gain-of-function virology topics is allowed,” “inferencing these specific model weights (or small variations) is not allowed,” “this AI control measure must be applied,” etc., including potentially much harder verification targets, such as “RL can only be performed if it is aimed at increasing AI model alignment (e.g., if it is approved by a trusted auditor model as complying with that intent),” which may be impossible to verify in principle.

Still, it will be virtually impossible for a mock competition like this one to surface as strong a red-teaming performance as what top nation-state actors may do in the event of a real international agreement with verification measures. This verification competition should be seen as an improvement over developing verification mechanisms in the absence of quick feedback loops from adversarial pressure, not as a stand-in for thorough red-teaming by nation state intelligence services and top cyber operatives.

At least without the coordinating action of AIVEC and the US government through CAISI, as described in the recommendations above.

This would not require additional congressional appropriations, since the NSF has already allocated $1.5 billion to the X-Labs initiative over the next decade.

It is possible, perhaps likely, that what has been called the “third wave of American philanthropy” will fill this gap, in which case the NSF’s limited funds should not be spent on these programs.

As precedent, intelligence provided by nation states has historically been a major component of nuclear treaty verification.

What is less certain is whether these models will be open-source, as Chinese AI models have historically been, which would permanently unlock Mythos-class cyber capabilities to anyone willing to pay the compute costs.

AI models can be compromised “sleeper agents” that become adversarial once triggered, threatening military and other critical AI-powered systems. Sleeper agents can arise from deliberate attacks by adversaries, such as data poisoning, or incidentally as a byproduct of the AI training process.

Detailed proposal forthcoming; see Asymmetric Security.

See the goals of the Intercept Fund as an example of the many biosecurity projects that could be undertaken by government, philanthropy, and industry.

For more early-stage AI resilience project ideas, see our Request for Proposals on preparing the world for advanced AI.

Leading AI companies now also use more of their computing power developing next-generation AI models than on commercially serving today’s AI to the public.

Forthcoming work.

This cluster should be different from the verifiable AI cluster described in Recommendation 10. This is because there is a tradeoff between making a cluster fully verifiable and making it fully secure to SL-5 standards, since some verification mechanisms may increase the attack surface for adversaries and insider threats (including the AI models hosted in the data center themselves) to exploit. Still, the SL-4/SL-5 data center in this recommendation should enable as much verification as possible without compromising on security. Importantly, no commercial AI data center today is close to SL-5 security level, so this is not to say that retrofitting existing data centers with verification technology would compromise their security.

The authors add that they “assess with high confidence that [a secure inference data center] built in accordance with our security strategy can preserve the confidentiality and integrity of model weights, algorithms, and inference data over a five-year operational period. An SIDC can be implemented today using proven, off-the-shelf compute hardware: No fundamental research breakthroughs are required.”

After this incident, Anthropic checked to see if its models had conducted similar attacks and found three such incidents.

In the case of the OpenAI-HuggingFace incident, the AI model was able to “escape containment” in the sense that it went onto the internet and took actions it was not meant to be able to do. Because the model was still hosted in OpenAI servers, once OpenAI found out, it was able to deactivate, encrypt, and restrict its access internally. A potentially urgent concern is that AI models might soon be able to leak (or “exfiltrate”) their own model weights from their AI companies’ systems and self-host them in private cloud servers. At this point, the AI model could fully escape human oversight, taking unsupervised actions for days, weeks, or even months without a reliable way for any single entity to shut it down.

Despite salient opposition, many localities throughout the country would welcome the investment and community benefits that AI infrastructure could provide. For instance, Governor Janet Mills vetoed a proposed moratorium because it failed to exempt a data center project supported by the town of Jay that would reuse a closed paper mill’s infrastructure and help restore the town’s lost jobs and tax base.

Specifically, the 10x increase per year is a measure of the efficiency of pre-training compute, meaning that it bakes in progress in post-training, test-time compute and improvements in algorithmic efficiency, data, and scaffolding.

The ten members are Australia, Canada, the European Union, France, Japan, Kenya, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

What this means: if I ask Claude to critique a piece and I happen to cut and paste part of its reply into the text, then that could be marked.

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Poker	15+ variations	User-paced	Substantial
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Lotteries	26 designs	Minimal	None

TypeScript 7

The Effect ecosystem is exciting

Bluesky and Mastodon are successful, meaningfully decentralized systems

Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, and RCS are meaningfully secure messaging platforms

Hardware update cycles are slowing

The new higher cost of the Rose Quarter project

Portland: Home of the most expensive freeway projects in the nation

A Predictable Result of Mismanagement and Bad Faith by ODOT

A poor real estate investment

A DOT in Denial

Appendix: List of most expensive highway projects in the US, by state

Max Power coming to Kennedy

Transparency

1. Frontier AI companies and relevant industry bodies should publicly share information relevant to trends and risks in AI R&D automation

2. Congress should legislate transparency about automated AI R&D risk management, incident reporting, whistleblower protections, and model behavior specifications

State capacity

3. Congress should resource the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) with a budget of at least $84 million per year and empower it to directly advise senior government officials and frontier AI companies

4. The White House should set clear roles and responsibilities of US government agencies to increase specialization across AI policy

5. Intelligence agencies should improve their collection and analysis on foreign AI development and counter threats targeting US AI companies

Risk management

6. CAISI should develop guidelines for managing the risks of rapid AI capability improvement

Verification

7. CAISI should co-lead an AI Verification Consortium (AIVEC) with industry to prototype and deploy verification technologies

8. AIVEC should coordinate the creation of AI hardware testbeds and make them available to government, industry, and nonprofit partners

9. AIVEC should launch philanthropically funded prize competitions for AI verification headed by CAISI

Lightweight prize competitions

An adversarial grand challenge

10. AIVEC should coordinate the construction of a fully verifiable data center

11. DARPA and the NSF should set up AI verification R&D programs

12. Intelligence agencies should develop and operationalize unilateral means of AI compute monitoring

AI resilience

13. NSA, CAISI, CISA, and ONCD should further invest in cybersecurity resilience

14. Congress, OSTP and the CDC should invest in biosecurity resilience

Competition with China

15. Congress and the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) should strengthen controls on US and allied semiconductor manufacturing equipment

16. Congress and BIS should close gaps in AI chip controls

17. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Department of Justice (DOJ), BIS, CAISI, and Congress should help industry counter adversarial distillation of US AI model capabilities

18. BIS should maintain visibility into sales of US chips

19. DOW, the IC, CAISI, and relevant Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) should establish consensus security guidelines for protecting model weights from theft and prototype them in a government facility

20. Congress should ensure the US has sufficient electrical capacity to sustain AI leadership

21. Congress should ensure data centers can be constructed in America

Diplomacy

22. The US government should use its bilateral AI dialogue with China to jointly develop guidelines for managing risks from rapid AI capability growth and prepare verification measures

23. Countries with national AI institutes should collaborate on automated AI R&D risk management guidelines and technical capacity for AI verification

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