Nuclear arms control worked not because rivals trusted each other, but because compliance could be verified. AI governance now needs the same kind of infrastructure before competition outruns our ability to contain the risks.

On 5 February, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (new START) expired with nothing to replace it. For the first time since the early 1970s, there are no legally binding limits on the strategic nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called it a “grave moment”.

Six months later, on 4 August, White House officials briefed executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Nvidia and Microsoft on a new framework for reviewing frontier AI models. Only closed, proprietary American systems that score at the frontier on classified cybersecurity benchmarks would be submitted voluntarily for pre-release government testing. Open-weight models, including Chinese ones, are exempt. The framework will not be published.

The timing is not a coincidence so much as a symptom. We are dismantling the one arms-control architecture that demonstrably worked while declining to build one for the technology most likely to require it next.

The dominant narrative in Washington holds that meaningful AI oversight is a unilateral concession to Beijing. Mark Zuckerberg put the case plainly in a Wall Street Journal essay last month: “We should accelerate AI development, not restrict it.” His logic is coherent on its own terms. However, it is also incomplete in a specific and correctable way, and the Cold War tells us exactly how.

What arms control actually solved

The lesson of the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT) and the Strategic........

© Pearls and Irritations