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The End of Mutual Assured Destruction?

What AI Will Mean for Nuclear Deterrence

August 7, 2025
A Russian intercontinental ballistic missile system in Moscow, May 2025
A Russian intercontinental ballistic missile system in Moscow, May 2025  Yulia Morozova / Reuters

SAM WINTER-LEVY is a Fellow in Technology and International Affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

NIKITA LALWANI is a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She served as Director for Technology and National Security at the National Security Council and as Senior Adviser to the Director of the CHIPS Program Office at the U.S. Department of Commerce during the Biden administration.

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The rapid development of artificial intelligence in recent years has led many analysts to suggest that it will upend international politics and the military balance of power. Some have gone so far as to claim, in the words of the technologists Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt, and Alexandr Wang, that advanced AI systems could “establish one state’s complete dominance and control, leaving the fate of rivals subject to its will.”

AI is no doubt a transformative technology, one that will strengthen the economic, political, and military foundations of state power. But the winner of the AI race will not necessarily

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