80,000 Hours Podcast With Rob Wiblin

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 wh