The Coming Wave

Suleyman co-founded DeepMind and later Inflection AI, and argues that artificial intelligence and synthetic biology together constitute a wave of technology that will be extraordinarily powerful, will spread rapidly and cheaply, and cannot be contained by any currently available mechanism.

His central problem is what he calls the containment problem. He argues that these technologies have four features making containment unusually difficult: asymmetry, meaning small actors can produce large effects; hyper-evolution, meaning development is faster than institutional response; omni-use, meaning the same capability serves beneficial and harmful purposes and cannot be separated; and autonomy, meaning systems increasingly act without direct human instruction.

He argues that the incentives running against containment are overwhelming, including geopolitical competition, commercial return, research prestige and genuine benefit, and that historically no technology of substantial value has been successfully suppressed. His proposed response has ten components including technical safety research, audits, choke points at the level of hardware and compute, developer accountability, business model changes, government capability building, international treaties, a culture of restraint within the research community, public participation, and coherence across all of them. He is explicit that he does not consider any of them sufficient.

The book is written by someone with substantial commercial interests in the technology he is warning about, which he acknowledges. Critics argue that the framing serves incumbent interests by favouring regulation that established firms can afford, and that the treatment of near-term harms is thin relative to the speculative risks. The containment framing and the four features are the analytical contribution.