The post below reflects the views of its author, and not necessarily those of any other OpenAI employees or of the organization as a whole. In general, posts written on this blog will similarly convey only the views of the author(s), not OpenAI organizational positions.

“Will it be sufficient… to trust these parchment barriers against the encroaching spirit of power?”
—James Madison, Federalist No. 48

It is our pleasure to launch Intelligence Age, the blog of OpenAI’s new Strategic Futures team. We are a small team with the collective goal of answering one overarching question: how should free society be restructured to preserve individual rights and agency while accommodating the emergence of transformative AI?

Questions like this are sometimes referred to as concentration of power risks within the broader AI safety and policy community. Our team is founded on the idea that, in the long run, this category of risk is the largest, most serious, and most conceptually challenging to address. Why?

The modern state is the product of a long, uneven process of bargaining between various centers of power, such as the owners of capital and commodities, the wielders of political power, and the people. Most fundamentally, political and military power has rested on labor . To hold political power is to possess the monopoly on legitimate force. For all of human history, that monopoly has consisted of soldiers and what we today call “police,” along with a vast civil-military bureaucracy—complemented, to be sure, by many technological tools, but fundamentally operated by human beings whose support was needed to sustain the operation.

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