When Leopold Aschenbrenner wrote that “we are building machines that can think and reason,” America was still trying to wrap its head around AI. This was back in June 2024; Aschenbrenner had just been fired from the most powerful AI lab in the world—OpenAI—and he wanted to warn people that this technology, which still sounded like science fiction to many Americans, posed the most important national security challenge since the atomic bomb.
“By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I,” he wrote. “Along the way, national security forces not seen in half a century will be unleashed.”
