My friend Leopold Aschenbrenner, who I got to know and respect on OpenAI’s now-disbanded Superalignment team before he left the company under disputed circumstances, just released “Situational Awareness,” one of the most extraordinary documents I’ve ever read. Leopold makes an impassioned plea for the US to beat China and its other autocratic adversaries in the race to superintelligence, and to start by preventing frontier model weights from being stolen. In any case, though, it’s very hard for me to imagine anyone in the US national security establishment reading Leopold’s document without crapping their pants.