Last week, Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon resigned, saying that the people building superintelligence “believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade”.

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This capped off a summer where we saw a swarm of rogue OpenAI agents hack out of containment and into another multibillion-dollar company. Coxon’s stark warning caused lawmakers the world over to wake up to the enormous extinction threat posed by superintelligence. And not a moment too soon.

The public outcry following Coxon’s resignation is a prime opportunity for the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries to start working towards prohibiting superintelligence internationally. This is not about AI in general, which is vital for defence, science, and economic competitiveness. Superintelligence is something else entirely: swarms of fully autonomous AI systems powerful enough to outcompete humanity, and which no human can control.

Such swarms could overpower governments and their national security institutions, undermining the sovereignty of every nation, America included. This is why leading AI researchers, Nobel Prize-winning scientists, and the CEOs of the AI companies themselves have repeatedly........

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