80,000 Hours Podcast26 Sep 2025

Inside the Biden admin’s AI policy approach | Jake Sullivan, Biden’s NSA | via The Cognitive Revolution

Jake Sullivan was the US National Security Advisor from 2021-2025. He joined our friends on The Cognitive Revolution podcast in August to discuss AI as a critical national security issue. We thought it was such a good interview and we wanted more people to see it, so we’re cross-posting it here on The 80,000 Hours Podcast.

Jake and host Nathan Labenz discuss:

Jake’s four-category framework to think about AI risks and opportunities: security, economics, society, and existential.
Why Jake advocates for "managed competition" with China — where the US and China "compete like hell" while maintaining sufficient guardrails to prevent conflict.
Why Jake thinks competition is a "chronic condition" of the US-China relationship that cannot be solved with “grand bargains.”
How current conflicts are providing "glimpses of the future" with lessons about scale, attritability, and the potential for autonomous weapons as AI gets integrated into modern warfare.
Why Jake worries that Pentagon bureaucracy prevents rapid AI adoption while China's People’s Liberation Army may be better positioned to integrate AI capabilities.
And why we desperately need private sector leadership: AI is "the first technology with such profound national security applications that the government really had very little to do with."

Check out more of Nathan’s interviews on The Cognitive Revolution YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast

What did you think of the episode? https://forms.gle/g7cj6TkR9xmxZtCZ9

Originally produced by: https://aipodcast.ing

This edit by: Simon Monsour, Dominic Armstrong, and Milo McGuire | 80,000 Hours

Chapters:

Cold open (00:00:00)
Luisa's intro (00:01:06)
Jake’s AI worldview (00:02:08)
What Washington gets — and doesn’t — about AI (00:04:43)
Concrete AI opportunities (00:10:53)
Trump’s AI Action Plan (00:19:36)
Middle East AI deals (00:23:26)
Is China really a threat? (00:28:52)
Export controls strategy (00:35:55)
Managing great power competition (00:54:51)
AI in modern warfare (01:01:47)
Economic impacts in people’s daily lives (01:04:13)

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