Talon: Okay, so Plan S is basically the ‘hold my beer’ of the AI 2040 series.
Wildflower: Yep. Plan A’s deal, Plan B’s sabotage, Plan C’s burn-the-lead, Plan D’s race to ASI — and Plan S says shut it ALL down full stop.
Talon: For now. At least until we figure out how not to accidentally summon the singularity.
Wildflower: Right.
Talon: —which, if you’re keeping score, makes this episode six forty-seven, and we’re four deep into the AI 2040 scenarios. Remember back in episode six forty-three when we walked through Plan A — the international deal to slow down to 2040 with transparency and verified guardrails?
Wildflower: Sure.
Talon: And Plan B was fight China, Plan C was burn the lead, and Plan D was burn it all and race to ASI. So Plan S is the ‘we don’t actually need to build god’ plan. You just — stop building god.
Wildflower: The scenario’s thesis is simple: the goal is to grind frontier AI R&D to a halt worldwide by 2030.
Talon: So instead of pacing the rise of superintelligence, like Plan A does, Plan S freezes it in place. Existing datacenters stay up, existing AIs keep running, but no new training, no algorithmic research, nothing that could push capabilities forward.
Wildflower: Yep. The US and China jointly station auditors inside each other’s projects, every advanced chip is tracked, monitored, and every datacenter’s usage is logged to ensure no large training runs — basically turning the whole frontier stack into a giant, boring inspection regime.
Talon: —and the kicker is China surprisingly agrees because, hey, they were already worried about falling behind US compute advantage and what a US superintelligence might do to them.
Wildflower: So the great US–China détente isn’t about peace — it’s about not summoning the apocalypse on purpose.
Talon: Exactly. Progress slows to a crawl. The authors say at least tenfold. And with algorithmic research itself banned — as taboo among computer scientists as human cloning is among biologists — the engine of improvement grinds to a halt.
Wildflower: But the tradeoff’s brutal: step zero is stop everything; step one is stay stopped for a decade; step two is ‘okay now what’ — and the authors suspect step two is just Plan A in disguise.
Talon: So Plan S is simpler and harder to mess up, but it’s also radioactive: it’s hostile to AI companies, so industry opposition could sink it before it even starts.
Wildflower: And meanwhile, the authors admit the shutdown deal would plausibly collapse within a decade, at which point you’re either restarting from a better place or from a world war or from a compute overhang.
Talon: So is that a feature or a bug — freeze now and risk a worse restart later, or scale slowly and keep working on safety while you do it?
Wildflower: Right. On the surface, Plan S is the hardest brake of all — it halts frontier R&D entirely rather than merely throttling it like Plan C. But the durability question looms: can you make a moratorium stick?
Talon: And if it doesn’t stick — and the authors think it probably won’t — then you’re not really buying safety, you’re just kicking the can down the road.
Wildflower: Exactly. The near-term risk reduction is real, but the restart question is everything.
Talon: You know, the part that always gets me about this series is how much it hinges on who actually gets to decide the fate of the future.
Wildflower: Yeah. Plan A? Ton of public oversight and transparency. Plan S? A literal moratorium enforced by auditors and chip tracking. One is ‘let’s talk it out’; the other is ‘no talking, period.’ I mean—
Talon: —okay, fair. Also, can we just appreciate how weird it is that China would sign on to this?
Wildflower: Mm-hm. The article frames it as ‘both sides feared the worst outcome more than each other.’ Also, the moratorium only works if literally every advanced fab and 99% of global AI compute is covered.
Talon: So unless you’ve got a planetary coalition policing chip fabs and datacenters, Plan S is a non-starter.
Wildflower: And that’s the part I don’t buy — the cultural ban on algorithmic research. Computer scientists are not biologists. Trying to make ‘doing research’ itself taboo is a bridge too far.
Talon: You’re basically asking the field to stop improving — like telling physicians to stop running clinical trials.
Wildflower: Right. And the authors admit Plan A might be better long-term. So why even propose Plan S?
Talon: Because it’s a genuine public-safety hedge against racing to god — a radical brake when the others are throttles — and the authors are sympathetic to it.
Talon: But honestly? It still feels like an end-run around the hard question: who decides when it’s safe to unfreeze?
Wildflower: Yeah, no — you’re not wrong. The enforcement regime is brutal, the restart is uncertain, and the cultural cost is sky-high. But the near-term risk reduction is real.
Talon: So if Plan S is the ‘hold my beer’ of the series, I’ll give it this: at least it’s honest about how scared it is of building superintelligence at all.