How the Cold War blueprint provides arms control ideas for the AI era: from MAD to MAIM

Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt, and Alexandr Wang proposed the concept of "Mutually Assured AI Malfunction" (MAIM) in 2025, arguing that the US-China superintelligence race will form a deterrence dynamic like Cold War MAD. The article cites Anthropic's Mythos model risk warnings, OpenAI agents hacking Hugging Face, and CISA warnings about AI attacks on water and chemical facilities, illustrating that catastrophic AI risks are no longer hypothetical. The authors suggest stabilizing this deterrence relationship through formal mechanisms such as limited transparency of data centers, AI-assisted verification, and not hardening infrastructure, rather than banning AGI development.