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People often say US-China deals to slow AI progress and develop AI more safely would be hard to enforce/verify.
However, there are easy to enforce deals: each destroys a fraction of their chips at some level of AI capability. This still seems like it could be helpful and it's pretty easy to verify.
This is likely worse than a well-executed comprehensive deal which would allow for productive non-capabilities uses of the compute (e.g., safety or even just economic activity). But it's harder to verify that chips aren't used to advance capabilities while easy to check if they are destroyed.
See also: Daniel's post on "Cull the GPUs".
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This does assume both countries have a good sense of the total number of chips controlled by each country’s developers, which seems doable but not trivial and worth working towards now.
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It's easiest to negotiate and most useful if both sides have a reasonably good estimate of how many chips the other side has. I think it will probably be easy for intelligence agencies on either side to get an estimate within +/- 5% which is sufficent for a minimal version of this. This is made better by active efforts and by government trying to verifiably demonstrate how many chips they have as part of negotiation.
(This is in part because I don't expect active obfuscation until pretty late, so normal records etc will exist.)
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I think it will probably be easy for intelligence agencies on either side to get an estimate within +/- 5% which is sufficent for a minimal version of this.
That seems plausible or even likely but I think it’s hard to be confident. Public estimates of chip production are high variance. For example, SemiAnalysis and Bloomberg’s estimates of Huawei’s 2025 chip production differ by 50% [1]. I doubt either US or Chinese intelligence will be better at estimating these numbers than independent researchers within the next few years. Maybe the true numbers would be...
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