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This could have a counter-intuitive impact.

Incentivizing people to become AI experts as a means to US citizenship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

Maybe. I'm not very concerned from an x-risk point of view about the output of people who would put in the minimum amount of effort to get on the radar, get offered the deal, then take it immediately and never work in AI again. This would be a good argument to keep the bar for getting the deal offered (and getting fined once you're in the States) pretty low.

If you make the bar too low, then it will be widely exploited. Also harder to enforce, e.g. how closely are you going to monitor them? The more people, the more onerous. Also, can you un-Citizen someone if they break the deal?

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.

There's an asymmetry here: Setting the bar "too low" likely means the United States lets a few thousand more computer scientists emigrate than it would otherwise. Setting the bar too high raises the chances of a rogue paperclip maximizer emerging and killing us all.

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