That only works if all governments cooperate sincerely to this goal. Not gonna work. Everyone will develop in secret. Have we been able to stop North Korea and Iran from developing nuclear weapons? Or any motivated country for that matter.
Or one could use honey instead of vinegar: Offer a fast track to US citizenship to any proven AI expert who agrees to move and renounce the trade for good. Personally I think this goal is much more likely to work.
It's all about changing what counts as "cooperate" in the game theory.
Publicly. Then possibly work for the NSA/CIA instead.
> ... bounties ... on people who are not US citizens.
Because that's not going to cause an uproar if done unilaterally.
It works for people that most of the world agree are terrorists. Posting open dead-or-alive bounties on foreign citizens is usually considered an act of terrorism.
Incentivizing people to become AI experts as a means to US citizenship.
Too high and you end up with more experts who then decide "actually it's more beneficial to use my new skills for AI research"
Tricky to get right.
Yes, obviously. They may be working on it to some extent, but they are yet to actually develop a nuclear weapon, and there is no reason to be certain they will one day build one.
Also, there is another research area that has been successfully banned across the world: human cloning. Some quack claims notwithstanding, it's not being researched anywhere in the world.