Fear, power, and superintelligence: A realist reframing of AI catastrophic risk

Abstract

Debates on catastrophic artificial intelligence (AI) risk often frame artificial superintelligence as a problem of value alignment: the central task is to ensure that advanced systems act in accordance with human intentions or moral principles. This article argues that such a framing is necessary but insufficient. The danger posed by artificial superintelligence is not merely that it may pursue the wrong values, but that it may introduce a new concentration of autonomous and potentially dominating power. Drawing on political realism in both political theory and international relations, we reinterpret AI catastrophic risk as a structural problem of power under anarchy. The core concerns of AI safety—instrumental convergence, race dynamics, and loss of control—already rely on implicitly realist assumptions about survival, self-help, and the pursuit of power. Yet proposed solutions often retreat into moralism, asking states, firms, or machines to behave ethically without sufficiently altering the incentives that drive competitive acceleration. Against both moralistic reassurance and fatalistic resignation, we argue that realism offers a constructive response. Fear can coordinate divided actors when a threat is perceived as immediate, symmetric, and visible. Artificial superintelligence plausibly satisfies the first two conditions: current evidence of strategic deception and agentic misalignment suggests a shortening temporal horizon, while loss-of-control dynamics would expose even first movers to subordination. What is missing is political visibility. The task of AI governance is therefore to create common knowledge of ASI as a prospective hegemonic threat through shared evaluations, mandatory incident reporting, and institutionalized transparency of peril. The aim is not to moralize machines, but to organize power before it becomes uncontrollable.