Director of Nat Sec Policy @EncodeAction | Balancing safety & innovation in AI, defense & emerging tech | 20-year vet | Prior @DoDDTRA | Dad joke enthusiast
Washington, DC
Joined April 2026
- Tweets508
- Following403
- Followers200
- Likes786
As the pace of frontier AI advancement continues to accelerate, it is critical to grapple with the implications of powerful AI and craft sound policy for the emergence of AGI.
Read the new report from @paul_scharre on the spectrum of AGI futures envisioned to date and how we can influence which one actually comes to bear.
Jason Baker retweeted
“To determine whether the Trump-Xi summit is fruitful, we can look for two key pieces of groundwork for future talks. Do Trump and Xi select consistent interlocutors to continue discussions at the working level, and can they identify concrete challenges related to AI that both sides want to tackle?” writes @hlntnr in her comments for @ChinaFile.
"An uncontrolled or misused AI can damage American interests whether it’s built in San Francisco or Shanghai."
Great piece by @rubyscanlon and @janet_e_egan
The U.S. and China don't trust each other (and rightfully so) but a much-needed agreement on AI safety can succeed despite that.
Read @rubyscanlon and @janet_e_egan's new CNAS Insights on verification technology as a path forward—and why R&D should begin now.
cnas.org/publications/cnas-i…
Jason Baker retweeted
Tomorrow, the UN Security Council will discuss AI loss of control for the first time. We have got you covered here at #UNGA.
@MarkLGoldberg @RichardGowan1 @SCRtweets @farnoushamiri @pass_blue
Jason Baker retweeted
this was a lot of fun!
thanks for having me on @KevinTFrazier.
If you don't already subscribe to @lawfare & @scaling_laws, here's your reminder to do so.
This was one heck of an AI conversation w/ @scaling_laws roadshow co-host @AlexBores, @NatPurser, @MackenZ_arnold.
Coming to a pod near you next week.
Count me as loosely holding a mostly overall positive impression of this, or at least the spirit of it (how's that for hedging?).
Some thoughts. 1/7
politico.eu/article/20-count…
President Stubb and I completely agree, however, "that that the upside of AI can be 'much higher' — if the tech is used correctly — ranging from 'the eradication of diseases, productivity, information and many other things.'” x/7
For more detailed thoughts on how to think about the potential for international coordination this UNGA / China visit week: api.omarshehata.me/substack-…
Jason Baker retweeted
This tweet (which David Sacks reposted) is a really weird way of describing the results of this Politico poll. The results here say that a very small number of voters rank AI as their number one most important issue. But this polling is completely consistent with AI issues being one of the top issues (e.g. a top three or top five issue) for many voters.
In fact, when you take it alongside results from Blue Rose (@davidshor), its clear that while a relatively small number of voters rank AI as literally their top issue, its salience is going up dramatically and nearly 50% of voters now rank it as "an important issue" - up from 25% in 2024.
The fact its not beating out "Cost of Living" at #1, doesn't mean that it doesn't have a very real potential to change election results.
I actually think that Adam has had a point previously when he has said that some issues on tech regulation were not actually priorities for voters in the way they were salient for elite policymakers. But this current wave of concern over AI is meaningfully different.
New Politico Poll: CA voters rank AI & data centers as only their #9 top issue. Even AI pessimists only rank it their seventh.
Cost of living, housing, wealth gap, even democracy, far outrank AI.
All the campaign consultants prioritizing this issue need to touch grass.
Jason Baker retweeted
Ah, there it is.
It will be extremely interesting to see what comes of this—or whether the AI labs have become too essential to meaningfully punish.
China’s internet regulator is investigating DeepSeek and Moonshot AI after Anthropic alleged both companies had been routing sensitive user data to Claude models, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
theinformation.com/articles/…
Jason Baker retweeted
It's sad. I was just talking to a China hand today about the uneven and perilous state of China military studies in this country, and now the Air Force is apparently shutting down its China Aerospace Studies Institute. We are moving in the wrong direction
Jason Baker retweeted
OpenAI, Anthropic, and >1,300 employees at all the major AI companies think the US government should prepare to “pace” automated AI R&D.
The problem: “pacing” is pretty vague, and could be pretty bad.
To fix this, we pulled our team together and developed 23 low-regret policy ideas to understand and manage the risks of automated AI R&D.
Here they are:
1. Frontier AI companies and relevant industry bodies should publicly share information relevant to trends and risks in AI R&D automation
2. Congress should legislate transparency about automated AI R&D risk management, incident reporting, whistleblower protections, and model behavior specifications
3. Congress should resource the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) with a budget of at least $84 million per year and empower it to directly advise senior government officials and frontier AI companies
4. The White House should set clear roles and responsibilities of US government agencies to increase specialization across AI policy
5. Intelligence agencies should improve their collection and analysis on foreign AI development and counter threats targeting US AI companies
6. CAISI should develop guidelines for managing the risks of rapid AI capability improvement
7. CAISI should co-lead an AI Verification Consortium (AIVEC) with industry to prototype and deploy verification technologies
8. AIVEC should coordinate the creation of AI hardware testbeds and make them available to government, industry, and nonprofit partners
9. AIVEC should launch philanthropically funded prize competitions for AI verification headed by CAISI
10. AIVEC should coordinate the construction of a fully verifiable data center
11. DARPA and the NSF should set up AI verification R&D programs
12. Intelligence agencies should develop and operationalize unilateral means of AI compute monitoring
13. NSA, CAISI, CISA, and ONCD should further invest in cybersecurity resilience
14. Congress, OSTP, and the CDC should invest in biosecurity resilience
15. Congress and the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) should strengthen controls on US and allied semiconductor manufacturing equipment
16. Congress and BIS should close gaps in AI chip controls
17. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Department of Justice (DOJ), BIS, CAISI, and Congress should help industry counter adversarial distillation of US AI model capabilities
18. BIS should maintain visibility into sales of US chips
19. DOW, the IC, CAISI, and relevant Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) should establish consensus security guidelines for protecting model weights from theft and prototype them in a government facility
20. Congress should ensure the US has sufficient electrical capacity to sustain AI leadership
21. Congress should ensure data centers can be constructed in America
22. The US government should use its bilateral AI dialogue with China to jointly develop guidelines for managing risks from rapid AI capability growth and prepare verification measures
23. Countries with national AI institutes should collaborate on automated AI R&D risk management guidelines and technical capacity for AI verification
You can read an intro to the report over at @Noahpinion’s Substack: noahpinion.blog/p/should-we-…
And read the full report here, which has a bunch more detail on each recommendation: ifp.org/preparing-for-ai-res…
Jason Baker retweeted
The Chinese may not respond to a fax but you can be damn sure they’ll have read it.
Re "notification mechanism, I can't stop thinking about this point @mattsheehan88 made recently: maybe it should be via fax. Sounds crazy, but read his argument -
> Matt: We have had a lot of these crisis communication lines on military issues, and the U.S. complaint is always: Oh, the Chinese side doesn’t pick up the phone when we call them.
And that’s a real issue. I think one mitigation to that is — somewhat ironic — not to use a phone but to use a fax machine.
>Ezra: Literal faxes?
> Matt: Literal faxes. It has a logic to it, too. Because the political system there is not a system of empowered individuals. It’s a system of committees and a system of documents.
So when our treasury secretary — someone who feels very empowered on the U.S. side — picks up the phone and is like: Give me some answers, He Lifeng — or other Chinese counterpart — they’re kind of like: Eh, not really ready to give you answers on the fly.
Much better to send a document over to their system that they can review, they can bring it to their committee, they can come up with their understanding and response and send something back.
So something in that vein, that at least puts a little bit of a safety net on these incidents that — I think something like that is pretty likely to happen in the next year.
(from nytimes.com/2026/09/15/opini… )
