In January, I spent over 100 hours:

• reading 50+ AI safety 'plans',
• interviewing with 10+ AI safety researchers; and
• thinking about AI safety strategy, drawing on my 2.5 years in the field

This list of routes to AI safety success (updated June 2025) is a key output of that research. It describes the main paths to success in AI safety. I’d guess that understanding the strategies in this document would place you in the top 10th percentile of people at AI safety strategy in the AI safety community.

Part 1: International approaches

International safe actors race ahead

Get “good” international coalitions to be the first people to develop advanced AI, and do so safely. They then would use this AI model to shift the world into a good state: for example by accelerating one of the other paths below.

CERN for AI is a common model for this. These proposals usually envision shared infrastructure and expertise for frontier AI research, combining the efforts of many nation states together.

This can be approached from two angles:

• make AI superpowers (US, China) more cooperative and democratic
• make cooperative democracies (EU, UK, Australia, etc.) more AI-capable

Resources:

• Building CERN for AI (Center for Future Generations) - European-led international research consortium with tiered membership (EU core plus UK, Switzerland, Canada), specific funding mechanisms and governance structures for trustworthy AI development.
• What Success Looks Like (EA Forum) - Scenario 6 "Apollo Project" where well-resourced international project develops safe AI first.