The Pentagon-Anthropic Clash Shows that an AI Treaty Would Decentralize Power, Not Concentrate It
By Rufo Guerreschi on March 2nd, 2026.
The Pentagon's recent pressure on Anthropic reveals an uncomfortable truth: the feared "human power grab" isn't a consequence of a global AI treaty — it's already happening because we lack one. In the absence of governance, militarization, de-facto nationalization, and the erosion of AI alignment work become virtually inevitable. Paradoxically, a treaty led by distrustful "strongmen" leaders would produce more resilient, decentralized governance — precisely because such leaders would be far more wary of excessive global power, and would demand actually enforceable terms rather than relying on transient personal trust. We propose that a small coalition of AI lab CEOs, through an assurance contract mechanism, could catalyze the bold US-China-led treaty we need — one that prevents both ASI catastrophe and authoritarian capture. Our Rome convenings on June 4-5 aim to bridge exactly this gap.
Many AI safety experts and leaders of top AI firms are calling for strong global coordination and an AI treaty. But a central concern — especially among those very leaders — is that the necessary boldness of such a treaty, and the fact that it would inevitably need to be spearheaded by two "strongmen" superpower leaders, would lead to an immense and durable concentration of power.
This fear of an unaccountable global authority — often described as a "human power grab" risk by Anthropic’s Holden Karnofsky or as the risk of an Antichrist by Peter Thiel — frequently outweighs the perceived risks of losing control of AI, and consequent risk of extinction, which both acknowledge.
This fear is well-grounded — and it is leading a growing number of people in Silicon Valley, as Karnofsky among many others has acknowledged, to conclude that taking the Superintelligence gamble is the least bad option. This, even though they assign high probabilities to extinction and low probabilities that whatever values they embed in an ASI will persist long-term — assuming they get there before others do.
The Pentagon's recent pressure on Anthropic has deepened this fear. Even democracies like the US, it turns out, are quite willing to leave the door open to authoritarian and irresponsible uses of AI.
A Human Power Grab is not Happening because of an AI Treaty but because of its Absence
While surely those developments are a matter of concern, I'd argue that overall these developments show how the feared concentration of power is already occurring without a treaty, and primarily because of our lack of it.
The prospects of major wars and an accelerating US-China AI arms race are strengthening the hand of a US "strong executive." The Pentagon exerts forceful pressure on private AI companies to serve national security ends. In this environment, it is compelled to deploy AI in reckless ways — and to force US firms to cut corners on safety and ethical restraints to compete with an adversary that has none of those hesitations.
This dynamic leads to the militarization of top AI firms — one of OpenAI's five board members is the former director of the NSA — and makes their eventual de-facto functional nationalization increasingly justifiable, even inevitable, as Leopold Aschenbrenner has predicted. It could happen within months. Pressures like we have started seeing by the Pentagon are bound to deeply compromise AI alignment work, as noted by Helen Toner, among others.
In the absence of a treaty, in an ever more brutal race among nations and firms, it has become more morally justifiable for firms like Anthropic to drop in Feb 2026 its Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) commitment to pause and slow when it had reached grave risks such as recursive self-improvement (as it argued, correctly, through Karnofsky, that it would just set it back against competitors).
Treaties built on mutual suspicion are more durable than those built on personal chemistry
A treaty-making process led by "strongmen" superpower leaders would, counterintuitively, be more likely to produce a resiliently decentralized governance regime. Such leaders are above all attached to their own power and national sovereignty — they would never accept a global treaty-organization that is overly empowered or intrusive in their national prerogatives.
While praiseworthy, those agreements proved neither sufficient nor durable — precisely because they were premised on trust. Instead of "trust but verify," we need "trust or verify": a strict requirement for nations, firms, and citizens before they place confidence in any such treaty.
Furthermore, such a treaty would reduce the pressure to centralize power and maintain national or bilateral secrecy, as it would require the participation, trust, and oversight of a large majority of middle-power nations.
(See Strategic Memo v2.6, The Global Oligarchic Autocracy Risk—And How It Can Be Avoided, and pp. 124–130)
From an Assurance Contract to a US-China AI Treaty
To break the current deadlock, we believe that even just two CEOs — from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, or OpenAI — could negotiate and present to Trump an assurance contract, as proposed in January by FLI's Anthony Aguirre. This is a mechanism whereby a few top AI labs formally, legally, but conditionally commit to specific enforceable safeguards — such as bans on certain AI methods, architectures, and recursive self-improvement — which become binding only once a critical mass of other major players do the same.
Yet, to succeed, and actually lead to the AI treaty that we need, that is not sufficient. For this reason, we propose (as we hinted at in this post) that such an assurance contract also includes a specific and detailed call to Trump to pursue a China-US-led AI treaty with specific minimum requirements for the treaty and for the treaty-making process — to make sure that the foreseeable result of such a process would be substantially or radically better than just risking the ASI gamble.
A Critical Mass of Influencers Is Needed to Sway Trump
To gain enough political power to do so, such CEOs should aim to join forces with other key potential influencers of Trump's AI policy that are sympathetic towards a treaty and/or deeply concerned about safety risks
As we documented in our 356-page Strategic Memo, these include Vance, Bannon, Pope Leo XIV, Gabbard, Sutskever, Carlson, and Rogan — and could potentially extend to Sacks (who has stated he thinks about loss of control "all the time") and even Kratzios. (See Strategic Memo v2.6, Persuading Trump's AI Influencers, pp. 170–323)
In our vision, together, they should pitch a bold, US-China-led global AI treaty directly to President Trump — similarly to how Oppenheimer, Acheson, and others led Truman to present the Baruch Plan — for history's boldest treaty proposal, for nuclear weapons — on the very date of birth of Donald Trump.
These lab leaders and influencers would present a pitch for "The Deal of the Century" on purely pragmatic terms, as a means to: (a) reliably future-proof American leadership, (b) prevent China dominance, (c) avert potential safety catastrophe for the world and his family, while (d) avoiding the trap of a centralized, unaccountable global bureaucracy and autocracy. At a time when his ratings are at their lowest, and US voters are increasingly terrified of AI, Trump could leave a legacy "worth 100 Nobel Peace Prizes", enabling him to quietly retire in 2029 widely cherished around the globe.
A Treaty Enforcement that Prevents both ASI and Authoritarianism
For this treaty to be successful — and overall reduce global concentration of power and wealth — the proposers should propose bare minimum requirements for both the treaty-making process and the final agreement. To start, it should immediately launch, even before the treaty negotiations start, the joint development, at wartime speed, of mutually-trusted, beyond state-of-the-art, treaty enforcement mechanisms and diplomatic communications.
After an initial framing by the US and China — and an emergency bilateral interim treaty — the treaty-making process must involve the unique expertise of superpower security agencies, religious institutions, and independent experts, along with at least most middle-power nations. It must also safeguard the long-term innovation capacity and economic value of leading AI firms. The treaty should adhere to a subsidiarity-based model that is federalist and decentralized, ensuring it does not become a tool for a "human power grab" or global autocracy.
Most importantly, the treaty-making process should utilize models and methods that can avoid the huge failure of the past, avoid capture by one or two nations, prevent a veto, and make sure that a very competent treaty, open to future improvement, is approved — all of that in a predictable amount of time.
Most importantly, the process must use treaty-making models that avoid the failures of past multilateral efforts: preventing capture by one or two nations, eliminating the veto, and delivering a competent, improvable treaty within a predictable timeframe
Among the possible models, we believe that the constitutional convention model may be the best. This model - inspired by the 1787 US Constitutional Convention, as suggested by Sam Altman in 2023 — is the only one that can prevent the fatal use of the veto, succeed in delivering an extremely wide-scoped and fair treaty in short and predictable times, and ensure resilient subsidiarity terms. The model will be amended to be realistic: voting will initially be weighted by GDP to secure and future-proof US and China leadership, while still preventing a global duopoly.
(See Strategic Memo v2.6, A Treaty Enforcement that Prevents both ASI and Authoritarianism, pp. 130–139)
The Path to Rome – Bridging the Gap for the "Deal of the Century"
At the Coalition for a Baruch Plan for AI, we are actively working to build exactly the political bridge that an assurance contract would need. Our Deal of the Century initiative targets the convergence of key influencers — from AI lab CEOs to advisors to JD Vance, who has shown clear deference to the Pope on AI ethics — around a joint pitch for Trump to co-lead a US-China AI treaty.
A central step is our series of closed-door convenings in Rome on June 4-5, 2026, at Palazzo Falletti. These meetings aim to catalyze a "humanist AI alliance" that cuts across conservative, techno-humanist, and post-humanist among a critical mass of key potential influencers of Trump's AI policy.
We are counting on the Vatican's unique aggregating role. Pope Leo XIV has positioned AI as central to his papal mission, and his main AI advisor, Paolo Benanti has led a call for a bold AI treaty with top AI scientists. His moral authority can help counter the accelerationist consensus that dominates Silicon Valley but is deeply minoritarian among US voters and MAGA leaders.
The mechanism exists. The philosophical alignment exists. What remains is to bring the right people into the same room. That's what Rome is for.
