A Draft of a Treaty, with Annotations

Article III: ISIA

1. Treaty Parties hereby establish the International Superintelligence Agency (ISIA), to implement this Treaty and its provisions, including those for international verification of compliance with it, and to provide a forum for consultation and cooperation among Parties.

2. There are hereby established as the organs of the ISIA: the Conference of the Parties, the Executive Council, and the Technical Secretariat.

3. Conference of the Parties

   1. The Conference of the Parties comprises all Treaty Parties.
   2. The Conference of the Parties shall: Determine overall policy; adopt and oversee the budget; elect members of the Executive Council; consider compliance matters reported by the Executive Council; and adopt and revise Annexes upon Executive Council recommendation.
   3. It shall convene in regular session no less than annually, or at a more frequent rate as may be set by the Conference, in addition to special sessions as required. Each Party has one vote. Quorum is a majority of Parties.

4. Executive Council

   1. The Executive Council shall have 15 members: (i) 5 designated seats for permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, and (ii) 10 elected seats distributed by equitable geographic representation. Details of this are elaborated in Annex A.
   2. Elected members serve two-year terms. Half of the seats are elected each year.
   3. The Executive Council shall: approve challenge inspections; recommend budget and policy to the Conference; appoint the Director-General; provide oversight of the Technical Secretariat and approve its recommendations.
   4. Decision making processes are as follows:
      1. The Executive Council elects the Chair and Vice Chair of the Executive Council.
      2. The Chair or Vice Chair can act as the presiding officer.
      3. Voting proceeds by One Member, One Vote.
      4. Votes to approve a challenge inspection under Article X require a majority.
      5. Votes to recall or appoint a Director-General require two-thirds majority.
      6. All other decisions require a majority.
      7. Quorum requires two-thirds of the Executive Council

5. Technical Secretariat and Director-General

   1. The Director-General of the Technical Secretariat shall be its head and chief administrative officer.
   2. The Director-General is appointed by the Executive Council for a four-year term, renewable once. The Executive Council can recall the Director-General.
   3. The Technical Secretariat shall at its outset include technical divisions for Chip Tracking and Manufacturing Safeguards, Chip Use Verification Safeguards, Research Controls, Information Consolidation, Technical Reviews, Administration and Finance, and Legal and Compliance. The Director-General can create and disband technical divisions.
   4. The Technical Secretariat, by means of the Director-General, proposes changes to technical definitions and safeguard protocols, as necessary to implement Article IV, Article V, Article VI, Article VII, Article VIII, Article IX, and Article X of this Treaty.
      1. Time-sensitive changes to FLOP thresholds (Article IV), the size of covered compute clusters (Article V), and the boundaries of restricted research (Article VIII) may be implemented by the Director-General immediately in the case where inaction poses a security risk. Such changes remain in effect for thirty days. Past that, the changes need approval from the Executive Council to remain in effect.
      2. The Executive Council shall make decisions on matters of substance as far as possible by consensus; the Director-General should make efforts to achieve consensus. If consensus is not possible at the end of 24 hours, a vote will be taken, and the Executive Council shall accept the changes if a majority of members present and voting vote to accept the changes, and shall reject them otherwise.

6. The ISIA’s regular budget is funded by assessed contributions of Parties, using a scale derived from the UN assessment scale, subject to a floor and ceiling set by the Executive Council. Member states also have the option of making voluntary contributions for AI safety research related to alignment, interpretability, and capacity-building activities of member states including beneficial uses of safe AI, test bed development, good practices, information sharing, and the facilitation of cooperation and joint activities loosely modeled on the IAEA network of Nuclear Security Support Centers.

Precedent

The three-body governing structure of our treaty’s International Superintelligence Agency (ISIA) is modeled after that of the OPCW,^[1] the body tasked with implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). The names of these bodies are likewise borrowed from the OPCW. (An actual treaty may prefer alternate structures and names that serve the same functions; we provide precedent for some less centralized arrangements further below.)

The Executive Council established by our Paragraph 4, subparagraph (a) and (d) emulates the NPT’s Board of Governors. In designating five of fifteen Council seats for permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, we reflect that the five original Nuclear Weapons States of the NPT also happened to be the five permanent members of the UN Security Council; without their participation as central partners, the NPT would likely have floundered from the start.

Our provision for “10 elected seats distributed by equitable geographic representation” also echoes the NPT, which stipulates that its outgoing Governors include “the member most advanced in the technology of atomic energy including the production of source materials in each of” eight specified regions.

Taiwan complicates our treaty concept, given its delicate geopolitical situation and its status as the producer of most of the world’s AI chips. Fortunately, precedent provides guidance: Though Taiwan is not a party to the NPT, it has stated on multiple occasions that it considers itself bound by the principles of the NPT. Taiwan allows the IAEA to conduct inspections and apply safeguards to its nuclear facilities through a trilateral agreement with the United States and the IAEA. A similar arrangement could be worked out with regards to our treaty.

The decision-making processes of our treaty’s Executive Council have been modeled after the Board of Governors Rules and Procedures used by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the main organization for the international governance of nuclear technology.^[2] Voting procedures likewise follow the Statute of the IAEA.

Precedent for less centralized (but still potentially effective) treaty implementation mechanisms could be found in other nuclear arms treaties. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START I, START II, and New START), place responsibility for implementation and verification on the individual parties; each commit to procedures that allow the other to obtain reasonable assurance of compliance.

The “challenge inspections” in Paragraph 4(c) are modeled after the mechanism in Part X of the CWC; we will elaborate on this precedent with Article X.

Notes

As in other international bodies, the ISIA would be staffed by diplomats and technical experts from signatory countries. The purpose of the language above is to ensure that the ISIA is given authority to implement what the treaty requires and to update the treaty over time.

Our treaty prioritizes preventing the creation of superintelligence for as long as necessary. The ISIA centralizes the implementation of several key treaty functions toward this end, including maintaining the precise limits of permitted AI research, development, and deployment; being the primary verifier of treaty compliance; and consolidating confidential intelligence information from signatories. Critically, the cooperative operation of the ISIA builds necessary trust between signatories over time.

That said, this sort of approach comes with tradeoffs. A first tradeoff is that more centralization requires more trust between parties. Prospective signatories might not feel that it is politically viable to assign this level of authority to an international organization, or might not trust the organization to operate sufficiently independently of the controlling influence of its most powerful member(s).

An alternative arrangement could centralize only those few functions which must be centralized (such as maintaining and clarifying limits on AI research, development, and deployment), while allowing individual signatories to come to other arrangements for verifying and enforcing compliance.

A treaty like this would also face tradeoffs about how many parties to include. The text above would create a multilateral organization in which all states are invited to sign the treaty and participate in its execution. An alternative might be to start with only two major actors at the frontier of AI development, such as the U.S. and China. A narrow bilateral verification regime could meet each party’s needs while sacrificing the smallest amount of autonomy and transparency. Parties to a small treaty like that could then adopt a separate subsequent goal of bringing other states on board, until their security needs were met.

As the motive of this draft is to demonstrate what international controls could look like if world leaders around the world realized the pressing dangers, we illustrate a structure that would work in a scenario where a wide variety of parties recognize the common interest they have in joining a treaty such as this one.

As such, the structure of the proposed ISIA Executive Council includes all permanent UN Security Council members, and is modeled on the composition of the IAEA.

Given the status of TSMC as the preeminent AI chip manufacturer, any AI treaty must consider how to address Taiwan. As discussed in the Precedent section, we would encourage Taiwan to adhere to our treaty much as it adheres to the NPT without having signed it, through formal arrangements and/or declarations stating that Taiwan considers itself to be bound by the principles of this treaty and is open to on-site routine and/or challenge inspections..

This article describes a structure that puts significant power in the hands of the Technical Secretariat while giving oversight power to the Executive Council. One benefit to our draft structure is that it enables the technical body to carry out rapid decision-making and gives it a broad mandate to achieve its mission, albeit with any changes requiring approval from a simple majority of Executive Council members within 30 days in order to stay in effect.

While world leaders may be hesitant to delegate so much power to technical experts, technical experts may not trust geopolitical actors to resolve the thorny technical questions that would come up in implementing this treaty, and to be sufficiently adaptive to a changing technical landscape. But many other arrangements could also work.

One alternative approach would be to disaggregate further the responsibilities, definitions, and types of safeguards implemented by the ISIA (e.g., training FLOP thresholds, definition of CCC, definition of AI chip, whether a particular facility should be counted as a chip production facility, chip use verification protocols, defining Restricted Research, etc.) and establish different procedures for changing definitions according to how impactful the definition is, and according to how subject it might be to technological changes that demand rapid response.