![[ Center for Humane Technology ]](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/a65g5GlXRzw.jpeg "Stepping Back From the AI Brink: Our Extraordinary Moment Together In Iceland")
This week’s episode of Your Undivided Attention has an important backstory. This past May, Icelandic President Halla Tómasdóttir reached out to Aza and me. She had just seen The AI Doc film and was very moved by it. She had been following CHT’s work for some time.
She had a request for us: would we come to Iceland and help lead the entire country (and dozens of global leaders) in a discussion about the AI arms race and how to avert it together? She proposed a summit on October 11, a date specifically chosen to echo a very famous event from exactly 40 years earlier: when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met at Höfði House in Reykjavik, Iceland, to confront the threat hanging over both their nations – the nuclear arms race.
The Reykjavík Summit is famous because, although talks broke down there, the dialogue at that summit led to a major breakthrough. Just a year later, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, effectively banning the largest class of nuclear missiles. After decades of mistrust and brinkmanship, the impossible suddenly became possible.
Standing in a similar moment – with urgent timelines and mounting evidence of AI’s risks – Aza and I accepted her invitation. We’ve discussed the Reykjavík Summit on our podcast before, and that Reagan’s views on the prospect of nuclear war were heavily shaped by watching “The Day After,” a TV film broadcast live across America in 1983, which depicted the fallout of a fictional nuclear calamity.
Reagan and Gorbachev chose a different future. In this episode of Your Undivided Attention, President Tómasdóttir told us what she hoped her Reykjavík AI Summit would accomplish in the world. Not only did Iceland hold its own successful national AI dialogue preceding the summit (The AI Doc was broadcast on national TV), but Aza and I gave our new presentation, called “The Humanity Dilemma,” to a gathering of thousands of world leaders.
Our ask is concrete and direct: it’s time for a verified red line on using compute for recursive self-improvement. We can work out the verification mechanisms and AI treaties (something else we’ve covered on the show). What we need now is even greater momentum. We need to break this spell of inevitability that follows each fresh cycle of model releases and uncontrollable harms.
On this trip, Aza and I had the opportunity to visit the room at Höfði House where the Reykjavík Summit took place in 1986. We saw the exact chairs that Reagan and Gorbachev sat in. It was both sobering and moving. Our profound thanks to President Tómasdóttir for organizing an extraordinary convening, which we hope will lead to the next breakthrough on AI cooperation.
Please enjoy the episode. And if you’d like to watch The AI Doc yourself, it’s available to stream right now on Netflix.
– Tristan