In humanity’s quest to constrain the dangers from fast-advancing artificial intelligence, many have looked to the most revolutionary technology that preceded it: nuclear weapons. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has called artificial intelligence “far more dangerous than nukes.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who assigns The Making of the Atomic Bomb to employees and has likened himself to the Manhattan Project scientist Leo Szilard, describes the most powerful AI models as “weaponizable nuclear materials.” When asked how a technology such as AI can be regulated, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman often references the world’s nuclear materials watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. Even the director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, has made the same comparison.

These comparisons capture real parallels. Like nuclear weapons, frontier AI is powerful and hard to control. Like nuclear technology, it can be used for good or for ill. And like the Cold War arms race, the race for AI breakthroughs may reorder the global balance of power. The nuclear analogy, then, seems to offer a blueprint for how to effectively govern a promising but potentially dangerous technology such as AI.

But even if efforts to control the bomb may be a source of inspiration, they are not a ready-made template for AI governance. The analogy paints too rosy a picture of nuclear weapons governance, crediting it with successes that are still debated and may yet be unearned. It also blurs key differences between AI and nuclear technology that reveal just how much more difficult AI governance will be. Nuclear materials can be traced and accounted for to a much greater extent than AI components can. Nuclear weapons were designed, built, and now remain under strict government control; AI is built principally by private companies with strong profit motives, which move faster than states can regulate them. Whereas nuclear technology’s use cases are narrow, AI’s cut across nearly every sector and security domain.

AI governance also faces an additional challenge: policymakers need to mobilize support for action even as the scale of the threat remains abstract. Recent disclosures by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta that their advanced models escaped testing environments and gained unauthorized access to the Internet have raised alarm in Washington about the risks of frontier AI. But the implications of these incidents remain ambiguous. They are removed from most people’s everyday experience and have not yet caused large-scale harm, so they are unlikely on their own to generate the sustained political pressure needed to build and maintain a durable oversight regime. Despite the many warnings from researchers and policymakers about AI’s myriad risks, the technology has yet to experience a decisive moment, such as when nuclear weapons were used at the end of World War II, which transforms fear into action. But the world cannot wait for such a moment to act. Looking to history may be a productive place to start—but it cannot provide a ready-made blueprint for the problem that AI poses. Artificial intelligence is unlike any technology of the past, and the order that governs it must be, as well.

The most ambitious international visions for regulating AI borrow from nuclear governance in the belief that such a framework can both help minimize AI’s potential harms and boost the United States’ ability to lead. Haydn Belfield, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, has proposed an arrangement modeled on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) that would allow only certain states with sufficient domestic regulation to possess powerful chips—a nonproliferation regime for AI. Others, including Altman, argue for an independent body of experts with broad inspection and verification powers over AI, more akin to the IAEA. A third cluster seeks to re-create the arms control practices and mutual vulnerability of the Cold War to stabilize the AI race between the United States and China.

The allure of these precedents is understandable. The nuclear order is among the few successes of postwar global governance. In a 1953 speech to the United Nations, then U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower outlined a plan, which became known as “Atoms for Peace,” aimed at curbing the technology’s risks while promoting its benefits: countries could access nuclear technology so long as they promised to forgo using it for weapons.

The proliferation problem wasn’t solved immediately. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy predicted that 15 to 25 states would become nuclear powers in the following decade, and many senior U.S. leaders believed a nuclear war was inevitable. But by the 1970s, the nuclear order’s cornerstone treaty, the NPT, entered into force, and the IAEA’s expert-led inspections and verification regime, backed by Washington and Moscow, had begun to police it. The two superpowers negotiated test bans, convened arms control summits, and set up a crisis hotline. Today, the NPT commands virtually universal international assent. Only nine states possess nuclear weapons, and no nuclear war has occurred. Many take this to mean that humanity found the correct balance between preventing harm and promoting peaceful use. And if that balance could be found for nuclear weapons, perhaps it can work for AI, too.

The actual history of nonproliferation and arms control shows something more muddled: in many cases, it was superpower coercion and cajoling—and sometimes sheer cost—that thwarted nuclear aspirations. South Korea and Taiwan gave up nascent weapons programs after intense pressure from the United States, backed up by alliance guarantees, market access, and a threat to pull military support if they did not comply. Israeli airstrikes took out the Iraqi and Syrian programs; Libya surrendered its own under sustained U.S. and British pressure. Others gave up the bomb for internal reasons. Sweden and Switzerland did so because of its high costs, and Argentina and Brazil did when democratic transitions redirected their foreign policies toward regional cooperation. South Africa built six warheads before dismantling them as the end of apartheid transformed the country’s domestic and foreign priorities.

That no frontier AI model has yet caused a catastrophe may well be luck.

When states were determined to develop nuclear weapons and could withstand outside pressure, the nonproliferation regime had little power to stop them. India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan all managed to build the bomb. The order has thus always been incomplete—reliant on the collusion of nuclear states and their willingness to resort to force if need be to stop proliferation, and often unable to dissuade those determined to obtain nuclear arms. Even existing nuclear powers do not always cooperate; China and France, two of the five nuclear weapons states in the NPT, didn’t join it until 1992.

The nuclear nonuse record is just as contingent as that of nonproliferation. Conventional wisdom credits a suite of bilateral tools for the........

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