#257 – Tom Milton on how we could verify a US–China deal on AI
80,000 Hours Podcast · Oct 23, 2026 · 1:48:49
80,000 Hours Podcast · Oct 23, 2026 · 1:48:49
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If the US and China agreed to pause frontier AI training, how would either side confirm the other was complying? Today, Tom Milton argues, the most likely answer would be to shut down data centres entirely. That would throw away everything else those chips do, and make any agreement far more costly to accept.
Tom is CEO of Amodo Design, a UK hardware lab building prototype tools to verify how AI chips are being used. He argues that verification is what makes a slowdown affordable: if a cluster can be shown to be serving only existing models rather than training new ones, most of AI’s benefits can continue during a pause.
Amodo’s pilot reruns a cluster’s inference on a separate verifier server and checks that all of its network traffic can be explained by the agreed model. AI companies are developing related tools: in its October 2026 Frontier Safety Roadmap update, Anthropic reported a prototype that runs on production inference and checks that outputs come from a specific set of model weights.
The field is small. Tom estimates that only about 50 engineers worldwide work on compute verification, compared with the billions of dollars the US spent on Project Vela to detect Cold War nuclear tests. And custom verification hardware has long lead times: it has to be designed, security-tested, red-teamed by both sides, manufactured, and trusted before anyone can rely on it.
If a deal is struck in a hurry, Tom expects it to be assembled from whatever tools already exist. Were that to happen next month, he says, the only option would be to shut data centres down entirely. That is why he argues the work needs to scale up now, with more people and resources from AI companies, governments, and funders, so that better options are ready as soon as a deal is needed.
Tom and host Tom Reed also discuss how an AI company might evade verification, lessons from nuclear and chemical arms control, and how AI is changing hardware engineering.
Learn more about Amodo’s work at ai-verification.com.
Links, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/tm
This episode was recorded on September 29, 2026.
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Music: CORBIT
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