Comments on the BlueDot Strategy Course

I originally posted this as a quick take, but I just discovered that I needed to make it a post in order to include it in a sequence. This is a brief comment on an old version of the strategy course (August 2026). I created this note to share with students in the technical and governance courses as many students went through the strategy course first. • Bluedot uses power concentration rather idiosyncratically by including rogue AI as part of this pathway (I expect they made this choice so as to avoid needing a fifth pathway; also they included a video where Richard Ngo makes an fascinating argument for analysing risks in this way, though as far as I can tell, this seems to be a pretty idiosyncratic position). The term “power concentration” generally isn’t used this way within the broader community, so I thought I’d mention this to reduce potential miscommunication. It’s worth noting that the people who are most worried about rogue AI and the people who are most worried about power concentration often propose opposite interventions: risks from rogue AI can arguably be reduced by maintaining high standards in terms of who is allowed to build rogue AI, whilst people who are worried about power concentration would generally prefer AGI to be developed as an open source project.• Honestly, I’m not really a fan of using the term “power concentration” to describe a risk, even though I sometimes find myself using the term that way myself. I’m generally making a distinction between the risk and the intervention. I worry that using the term “power concentration” to describe the risk causes people to assume that the solution is automatically to distribute power. I think this is a reasonable proposal, but I want to see people to pursue solutions because they’ve consider the alternatives and decided that their proposed intervention is their best option, not because they were pushed in that direction by the problem framing.• I am not really a fan of the defense-in-depth framing.