ARGUMENT: NEEDED: AI HOTLINEThe U.S. and China Need an AI Incidents Hotline

Opening dialogue between the United States and China over AI security is significant, but Christian Ruhl writes in Lawfare thatthis is not enough. Given the rapid rate of progress of frontier AI research (including algorithmic progress and other quantifiable trends), “diplomats will need to be quick to come up with risk-mitigation measures if they want to be more than a talk shop. Moreover, these measures will need to be ‘future proof,’ meaning they can’t focus solely on current capabilities that will remain relevant for no more than a few months; risk mitigation needs to be flexible to respond to ever-more capable models.”“

Ruhl adds:

Ironically, the two countries can look to the past, not the future, for inspiration. Taking a page from Cold War cooperation, the two countries can look to the history of U.S.-Soviet confidence-building measures.The 1963 Hotline Agreement and the 1971 Accidents Measures Agreement could serve as models to bolster AI safety and security without immediately touching on delicate topics such as export controls on advanced chips. 

….

The U.S. and USSR signed the 1963 U.S.-Soviet hotline agreement in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, when both countries came dangerously close to nuclear war and realized that traditional means of diplomatic communication were too slow for the atomic age. Russian diplomats in Washington, for example, delivered messages via telegraph runner; Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin later recalled, “We at the embassy could only pray that he would take it to the Western Union office without delay and not stop to chat on the way with some girl.” The hotline helped to fix this problem, establishing the Direct Communications Link (DCL) that leaders used in attempts to deescalate during the Six Day War, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and other Cold War crises. 

We can’t afford to wait for the AI equivalent of the Cuban missile crisis. Much like nuclear technology, AI is promising but accident-prone, and could have unintended effects on strategic stability. For example, the integration of AI in military systems could quicken the pace of war, enabling what Chinese experts call “battlefield singularity” and Western experts call “hyperwar”—as war accelerates to machine speed, events on the battlefield may slip out of human control. In addition to these emergent effects, accidents happen; even with rigorous testing and evaluation—which may fall by the wayside as competition heats up—autonomous systems may encounter situations that cause them to behave in unexpected ways, increasing the risks of miscalculation and unintended escalation. These issues are not limited to the battlefield, however. At the cutting edge of civilian AI development—so-called frontier models—the risks may also be catastrophic. As leading AI scientists participating in the International Dialogues on AI Safety recently put it in their 2024 Beijing consensus statement, “Unsafe development, deployment, or use of AI systems may pose catastrophic or even existential risks to humanity within our lifetimes.” 

Many risk mitigation measures will rightfully focus on prevention. As part of an effective layered defense, which builds multiple layers of defenses in case the first layer fails, prevention must also be coupled with mechanisms to respond to and contain incidents if they do occur. (It may be a question of when, not if, as the thousands of entries in the AI Incident Database illustrate.)

Crisis communications tools like hotlines can help leaders manage incidents quickly and at the highest levels. Consider, for example, a near-future scenario in which one of the thousands of autonomous systems that the U.S. intends to deploy malfunctions or loses communications with the rest of its swarm while in the South China Sea; the U.S. military may wish to let the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) know that whatever this system is doing, it is unintended. Or consider a scenario in which China learns that a third state’s leading civilian AI lab has trained highly advanced AI, but that this system has started behaving strangely recently, accumulating resources on the world’s stock markets and attempting to gain access to systems linked with critical infrastructure. In this situation, China may wish to call on a hotline, and the two countries may have only minutes to work together to avert a catastrophe. 

Ruhl concludes:

Though politically tractable, establishing an AI hotline won’t be easy. Expressing a willingness to do something is just the first step to implementation. Then, after overcoming obstacles to implementation, simply establishing the hotline won’t be enough—both parties will actually have to use it. 

The Chinese party-state has a history of simply ignoring crisis communications tools even during crises like last year’s spy balloon incident. This is partly why the Biden administration has focused on crisis communications as another area of cooperation with Xi’s China. Yet this may be an even stronger reason to push for greater attention to hotlines and to build the shared culture of crisis communications that the Cuban missile crisis built for the U.S. and the Soviet Union.