To understand how the United States should prepare to respond to and prepare for potential artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence (AGI) developments in the future, the RAND Geopolitics of AGI Initiative is conducting Day After AGI exercises. This report summarizes six runs of the Two Moonshots scenario and participants' responses to reports of planned or pronounced progress toward AGI by actors in the United States and China.

Infinite Potential—Insights from the Two Moonshots Scenario

After-Action Report from a Sequence of Day After Artificial General Intelligence Exercises

Joel B. Predd, Matt Chessen, Gregory Smith

ResearchPublished Oct 14, 2025

To understand how the United States should prepare to respond to and prepare for potential artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial general intelligence (AGI) developments in the future, the RAND Geopolitics of AGI Initiative is conducting Day After AGI exercises. In each exercise, participants are presented with a scenario that represents both (1) an acute crisis for U.S. national or economic security and (2) a signpost on a path to a transformative AI future. With facilitation by a simulated National Security Advisor, participants diagnose the implications of the scenario for U.S. national security, discussing courses of action presented by their staffs and recommending a path ahead for the President of the United States.

This report summarizes six runs of the Two Moonshots scenario and participants' discussions and decisions in response to the crisis they encountered. Participants first encountered reports from the U.S. intelligence community that the Chinese Communist Party had decided to pursue a US$200 billion moonshot program intended to achieve AGI within 12 months. In the second turn, participants received an update that a leading U.S. AI company had asked for direct U.S. government support after the firm crossed a performance threshold that it claimed represents AGI.

Participants focused on the importance of the United States understanding developments on frontier AI in both the United States and abroad and building the government capacity necessary to support such understanding. They also emphasized the importance of building a framework for engagement between the U.S. government and private corporations developing advanced AI that could create opportunities for collaboration as the technology becomes more powerful.

Key Findings

  • Participants discussed that they needed to make judgments about the veracity of technical claims about AI capabilities that were implicit in the timelines of China's moonshot program and explicit in the U.S. company's request for U.S. government support.
  • Participants debated the bottlenecks that inhibited AI companies' progress. Participants often advocated capital investments and relaxing energy regulations. Participants also identified opportunities to give labs access to proprietary, sensitive, or even classified data holdings.
  • Participants debated the specific ways U.S. national security could be put at risk if China, rather than a U.S. firm, were the first to cross the performance threshold to AGI. Participants wanted the U.S. government to have the capability to quickly assess whether the development of AGI represents a durable first-mover advantage and what long-term advantages might accrue from AGI's use.
  • A participant's judgment as to the nature and consequences of an AGI first-mover advantage motivated how seriously they considered response options that might advantage U.S. AI development but could undermine strategic and crisis stability in the U.S.-China security relationship.
  • Participants who deemphasized threats to humanity relative to the threat from falling behind China were motivated to recommend actions to counter China’s AI progress or accelerate U.S. progress. Participants who emphasized safety risks were motivated to recommend actions that could sacrifice absolute advantage over China in favor of actions to reach an entente with China in service of longer-term human security.
  • Recommendations for U.S. government response were contingent on judgments about how much time was available to act in response to the development of an "AGI," which in turn relied on how that participant defined that technology. Participants who saw AGI as granting a first-mover advantage advocated a more-aggressive response, whose implementation would require short-circuiting the U.S. government's traditional processes.

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Predd, Joel B., Matt Chessen, and Gregory Smith, Infinite Potential—Insights from the Two Moonshots Scenario: After-Action Report from a Sequence of Day After Artificial General Intelligence Exercises. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2025. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4230-1.html.
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