Jake Sullivan is furious that Trump destroyed his AI foreign policy

In 2022, Jake Sullivan, then national security adviser under President Joe Biden and a powerful figure in the White House’s foreign policy team, assembled an interagency planning exercise out of the Situation Room: What were all the possible circumstances and outcomes of an AI arms race between the US and China — from trade wars to real wars, possibly even the arrival of AGI — and how would the federal government respond?

The details and results of that simulation are classified, but on Sunday, I spoke to Sullivan and asked if he could at least describe one outcome: Did they ever run a scenario where the AI industry’s profit interests were driving foreign policy instead of the government?