The Many Challenges of AI Safety

Jack chats with Sebastian Mallaby, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, about his new book The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence. They discuss current challenges in AI safety, the U.S.-China race and prospects for cooperation, and the emerging risks posed by powerful new models like Anthropic’s Mythos. They also talk about tensions between frontier labs and the U.S. government, and the trajectory toward greater government control.Mentioned:* Sebastian Mallaby, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence (2026)Thumbnail: President Trump delivers remarks at the White House AI Summit in Washington, D.C., Wednesday, July 23, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to Executive Functions.This is an edited transcript of an episode of “Executive Functions Chat.” You can listen to the full conversation by following or subscribing to the show on Substack, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.Jack Goldsmith: Today I’m chatting with Sebastian Mallaby, who’s a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an acclaimed biographer and writer. And we’re going to be talking about his newest book, which is called The Infinity Machine. Sebastian, thanks for talking with me.Sebastian Mallaby: Thank you, Jack. Nice to be with you. So tell us what the book is about. Who is Demis Hassabis, and why did you write a book about him?So the book is about artificial intelligence, and it’s centered on this character, Demis Hassabis, who is, in a way, the OG sort of AI lab leader, right? He starts DeepMind, this startup in London, back in 2010, before AI could even recognize the photograph of a cat—like nothing worked. It was full AI winter.So this is five years before Sam Altman and Elon Musk start OpenAI. It’s fully 11 years before Anthropic gets started. So he was extremely early.So if you wanted to tell the story of the making of modern AI through a personality, you know, Demis’s career and intellectual development maps perfectly onto that story.So the thing that’s most interesting to me about him is that, as you emphasize in the book, his real interest in this, I think it’s fair to say, is scientific and not profit-making. And he, at least at the outset, and I think even today, has a rather idealistic—to me anyway, idealistic or optimistic—conception of the technology and how it can be used.But the story I also see is someone who—and I don’t mean this uncharitably—but who has basically engaged in a series of compromises or fudges with regard to those values as he’s gotten deeper and deeper into the AI competition.So is that fair? And can you talk about that arc?Yes. I mean, he started DeepMind in 2010 with an absolute focus on AI safety. In fact, he met his scientific co-founder, Shane Legg, at a safety lecture in which Shane projected that by 2030 or so, AIs would be sophisticated enough—cleverer than humans—have their own sort of objective functions, and would maybe start to threaten humans.And this was the lecture over which they bonded. And then in 2014, Demis Hassabis sells his company DeepMind to Google. And part of the sale condition was that AI would not be used for military purposes, that it would be safeguarded by a sort of ethics oversight committee that would be separate from the corporate leadership of Google.So he took it very seriously. And then this continues