80,000 Hours Podcast26 Sep 2025

Inside the Biden admin’s AI policy approach | Jake Sullivan, Biden’s NSA | via The Cognitive Revolution

Jake Sullivan was the US National Security Advisor from 2021-2025. He joined our friends on The Cognitive Revolution podcast in August to discuss AI as a critical national security issue. We thought it was such a good interview and we wanted more people to see it, so we’re cross-posting it here on The 80,000 Hours Podcast.

Jake and host Nathan Labenz discuss:

Jake’s four-category framework to think about AI risks and opportunities: security, economics, society, and existential.
Why Jake advocates for "managed competition" with China — where the US and China "compete like hell" while maintaining sufficient guardrails to prevent conflict.
Why Jake thinks competition is a "chronic condition" of the US-China relationship that cannot be solved with “grand bargains.”
How current conflicts are providing "glimpses of the future" with lessons about scale, attritability, and the potential for autonomous weapons as AI gets integrated into modern warfare.
Why Jake worries that Pentagon bureaucracy prevents rapid AI adoption while China's People’s Liberation Army may be better positioned to integrate AI capabilities.
And why we desperately need private sector leadership: AI is "the first technology with such profound national security applications that the government really had very little to do with."

Check out more of Nathan’s interviews on The Cognitive Revolution YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast

What did you think of the episode? https://forms.gle/g7cj6TkR9xmxZtCZ9

Originally produced by: https://aipodcast.ing

This edit by: Simon Monsour, Dominic Armstrong, and Milo McGuire | 80,000 Hours

Chapters:

Cold open (00:00:00)
Luisa's intro (00:01:06)
Jake’s AI worldview (00:02:08)
What Washington gets — and doesn’t — about AI (00:04:43)
Concrete AI opportunities (00:10:53)
Trump’s AI Action Plan (00:19:36)
Middle East AI deals (00:23:26)
Is China really a threat? (00:28:52)
Export controls strategy (00:35:55)
Managing great power competition (00:54:51)
AI in modern warfare (01:01:47)
Economic impacts in people’s daily lives (01:04:13)

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(342)

How middle powers avoid losing everything in a post-AI world | Anton Leicht

In a post-AGI world, can a country without access to frontier AI even be considered sovereign anymore?Anton Leicht says once frontier AI becomes a core economic input, the countries that own it will p...

14 Jul 1h 33min

#246 – Sneha Revanur on how a small team of activists helped pass America's landmark AI safety laws

Six years ago, aged just 15, Sneha Revanur founded the AI advocacy nonprofit Encode AI — back when AI felt like a niche issue. Now the world’s caught up with her, and she’s ready to share everything s...

8 Jul 52min

We can guess what intergalactic war would look like. And strangely, it matters.

Intergalactic war is probably billions of years away — yet physics can already tell us how it ends. And strangely that conclusion is relevant to decisions people have to make today.In this video, Rob ...

18 Jun 15min

How AI could create the world’s biggest problems (article by Zershaaneh Qureshi)

Imagine you’re living 15,000 years ago. Your people are hunter-gatherers and you sleep under the stars. If someone told you humans would one day build cities with millions of people, fly through the a...

11 Jun 1h 29min

#245 – Rohin Shah on what it's really like to run AGI safety at Google DeepMind (and where I disagree with 'doomers')

Most people working on AI safety think without a massive effort AI systems will probably end up with goals catastrophically different from humanity’s. Today’s guest, Rohin Shah — head of AGI Safety an...

2 Jun 2h 48min

What makes for a dream job? | Benjamin Todd

What actually makes a job fulfilling? It's not what most career advice tells you. "Follow your passion" sounds inspiring, but it's misleading — and the research backs that up.Drawing on hundreds of st...

28 Mai 28min

#244 – Benjamin Todd on how we’re updating our career advice for the strangest time in history

The average career is 80,000 hours long. With AI advancing so rapidly, the hours you have left in your career matter more than ever.Some leading AI researchers think there’s a 10% chance that AI syste...

26 Mai 1h 6min

Can AIs already start 'rogue deployments' inside AI companies? (Landmark new METR report)

A red-teamer was embedded inside Anthropic for three weeks, told to imagine he was an evil Claude, and asked to figure out how to launch a ‘rogue AI deployment’ without getting caught. It’s one part o...

20 Mai 20min