The proposal comes from Jacob Stokes, deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security and a former Obama administration national security staffer.

Stokes argued that U.S. agencies, including the Department of Defense and National Security Agency, should begin assessing what intelligence would be needed to evaluate such scenarios.

A recent CNAS report titled “Superpowers and AGI” examines how the arrival of AGI could affect competition between the United States and China.

AGI refers to a hypothetical AI system capable of performing at human levels across a wide range of tasks.

The report argues that while the U.S. currently has a months-long lead in frontier AI models, China could potentially make a “surprise technological breakthrough” and reach AGI first.

The proposal illustrates how AI development is increasingly being treated as a national security issue, not simply a technology race.

It also raises difficult questions about how far governments should go to protect an AI advantage and what the consequences could be for global stability.

The United States should prepare for scenarios in which extreme measures could be considered to prevent China from achieving artificial general intelligence, including espionage, cyber operations and military strikes on Chinese data centers, according to the South China Morning Post.