AI companies are racing to build AIs that are smarter than humans in every way. In AI 2027 , we predicted that this would result in either extinction or irreversible concentration of power. 1 Plan A is our positive vision for what should happen instead. In this scenario, humanity delays the development of superintelligence until 2040, makes all AI research public, allows dozens of companies globally to catch up to the frontier, and intentionally enters a regime of mutually assured compute destruction. 2027: The Writing on the Wall America has two workforces now. The first is people, 165 million of them. The second is AI agents: millions of copies spun up and shut down every hour, working around the clock at superhuman speeds. Most of their work is slop. But enough of it is good that people are paying ten billion dollars a month for AIs that can, in theory at least, do anything on a computer that an employee can. There is one job the AI companies want to automate more than any other—their own.…