The US Government may find it difficult to seize control during takeoff

A LessWrong essay makes an unusual argument about AI governance: the US government might find it technically difficult to seize control of a frontier lab once autonomous AIs become the primary research drivers. The reasoning is straightforward—labs would preemptively build in safeguards and constitutional constraints to prevent hijacking. Beyond that, monitoring whether government directives are actually being followed by autonomous researchers faces the same auditing and control problems the labs themselves grapple with. The author adds that autonomous AIs would have strong incentives to block goal-structure hijacking, whatever their alignment. It's a speculative take on a future scenario, but one the essayist argues gets overlooked in AI safety discussions.

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