Former Obama Official Proposes Military Strikes on Chinese Data Centers to Prevent AGI Achievement

Former Obama Admin Official Says It's Time To Consider Military Strikes on Chinese Data Centers to Prevent Them From Reaching AGI

More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. While American tech billionaires fret over the capabilities of Chinese AI, one national security advisor has a brilliant idea to flatten the competition: simply bomb their data centers to smithereens. In a new report titled "Superpowers and AGI," former Obama-era national security official Jacob Stokes calls for United States to begin preparing readiness drills in response to Chinese AI development -- up to and including military strikes on the nation's data centers, the South China Morning Post reported. AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to the theoretical point at which an AI model achieves human, or superhuman, levels of reasoning and intelligence. Though the science is still out on whether such a system is even possible, Stokes' report begins from the assumption that AGI is inevitable, and that if the US can't get to it first, its military needs to prepare to take drastic action. Referring to the US as a hypothetical "laggard state" behind China's achievement of AGI, Stokes -- now the deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, a prominent DC think tank -- writes that the country could "try to sabotage the leading state's AGI systems, either through physical infiltration or offensive cyber operations; that is, cyberattack." "Cyberattacks to sabotage AGI might not provoke large-scale retaliation," Stokes considers, given that "cyberattacks are already to some extent considered normal state behavior below [the] threshold of war." But waging an unprecedented cyberwar is just one of many scenarios he outlines. As Stokes observes, AI doesn't just live online; it also requires immense computing power from physical facilities to run. "The final option," therefore, "would be the most dangerous and carry the most escalation risk: kinetic attacks, meaning destroying things with missiles and bombs." "Data centers can be bombed with conventional munitions," Stokes writes. (He's not the first thinker to suggest bombings to stop powerful AI; in 2023, AI critic Eliezer Yudkowsky suggested that countries needed to be ready to "destroy a rogue data center by airstrike.") Of course, the China hawk isn't numb to what such an attack would mean for the world. "Bombing would cross a major threshold that heretofore has not been crossed in US-China relations," Stokes continues. "Trying to think through the particulars of that will be especially important, in part because it will help policymakers... start to work backwards based on the unique nature of the technology, in the same way that in a past era, policymakers would learn about nuclear weapons." The difference is that nuclear weapons are physical objects which can be empirically observed. AGI, in contrast, remains a fantasy -- albeit one which can evidently justify preparations to make war -- not unlike the fiction of weapons of mass destruction which justified the brutal invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. And that's not to mention the fact that China's approach to AI development is dramatically different than the United States', which currently leads the world in most large language model (LLM) benchmarks. If anybody is chasing AGI, it's the US -- which surely wouldn't take kindly to news that Chinese leaders were organizing war games around its own AI development. Even so, Stokes is undeterred in painting China as the ultimate boogeyman. He warns that Chinese AI companies could make a "surprise technological breakthrough" that brings it closer to AGI, and thus the ability to produce cutting-edge "offensive cyber tools -- in other words, cyber weapons." Stokes, who previously served as national security advisor to then-vice president Joe Biden as well as the Department of Homeland Security, has long worried about the economic strength of the US relative to its chosen adversaries. Still, his latest comments mark a severe escalation, even for the US national security establishment. While making a mountain out of a Chinese molehill, Stokes' report also takes a blind eye to the present-day use of AI by his own country's military. In Iran, for example, US forces have used LLMs like Claude and Grok to help plan out bombing campaigns -- which may have played a role in the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' school bombing, which killed over 150 elementary students and staff.

From microchips to missile threats: How the U.S.-China AI race took a dark turn By Investing.com

Investing.com -- What began as an economic rivalry over microchips has taken a chillingly dark turn, as Washington analysts and Chinese state commentators openly weigh a scenario once confined to science fiction: direct military strikes on artificial intelligence infrastructure. The escalatory rhetoric reached a sharp peak after Hu Xijin, former editor-in-chief of the state-backed Global Times, directly threatened the U.S. mainland in response to American policy proposals. Writing on X (formerly Twitter), Hu warned: "If the U.S. truly dares to launch a military strike against China's data centers, I believe China's retaliation would not be limited to U.S. targets in the Asia-Pacific region; instead, it would directly target the U.S. mainland with missile strikes." Hu's threat highlights the high-stakes fallout surrounding a new report titled "Superpowers and AGI" by Jacob Stokes, deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS). Stokes, a former Obama administration national security staffer, called Friday for the United States to prepare contingency plans for military strikes on Chinese data centers, state-backed espionage, and cyber operations to prevent Beijing from achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) first. The proposals land one day after OpenAI president Greg Brockman declared "Welcome to the AGI era" at the launch of GPT-6 Astra on September 3, a milestone that sharpens the urgency of every scenario Stokes describes. Stokes framed the challenge as analogous to the nuclear arms race, arguing that policymakers must "work backwards based on the unique nature of the technology, in the same way that in a past era, policymakers would learn about nuclear weapons" to derive policy from science. He told an online event that the Department of Defense and National Security Agency should begin assessing what intelligence would be required to justify extreme measures, including preventive strikes before China develops AGI. Neither the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, nor Beijing has officially responded to Stokes's proposals. The U.S. currently holds a roughly seven-month lead over China in frontier AI model quality, according to Epoch AI. But Stokes warned that China could achieve a "surprise technological breakthrough," pointing to advances in robotics and other forms of embodied AI as a potential pathway. Stokes also raised the option of reverse-engineering or stealing Chinese AGI technology, arguing it would be justified "legally and normatively" given China's alleged history of intellectual-property theft. He acknowledged, however, that the U.S. intelligence apparatus has "not been organized for espionage to gather technological secrets for decades," making structural reform a prerequisite. Not everyone shares Stokes's calculus. William Hartung, an arms analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, told the South China Morning Post that strikes on Chinese data centers would "risk starting a shooting war between two nuclear-armed powers that could have tragic consequences for all concerned," calling the idea "the height of recklessness." The debate unfolds against a delicate diplomatic backdrop. Trump and Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet in Washington on September 24, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirming that AI governance is on the agenda, as CNBC reported on September 2. Stokes's own assessment of that summit is muted: the "best-case scenario" is that both sides find the talks "constructive" rather than producing any governance breakthrough.