The rules would never work on a global economy.
If you think the entire world is going to shake hands and agree not to let their companies use a competitive advantage, that’s not a conversation I’m interested in having. It’s a fantasy.
If you think it’s that easy to get all competitors in a global economy to agree to a set of rules, maybe start with nuclear disarmament?
Getting people to agree isn't easy, that doesn't mean it wasn't worthwhile. There often even isn't any viable alternative to reaching an agreement in social settings.
When your hyper-competitive mode of thinking leads to undesirable consequences, you have to change your mindset. Reality doesn't conform to wishful thinking.
Almost nobody (I have to say almost) in the world including Xi, the ceo of deep seek, Dario, and even Sam Altman want AI to kill everyone. I really think we just have to
A. Get stakeholders to believe this is a bad idea.
B. show that we’re willing to do it first to prevent this stupid race from continuing.
The treaty came after the crisis, not before. And it only banned atmospheric, underwater, and space tests. The US and USSR kept testing underground on a large scale, while France and China never signed it and continued atmospheric tests for years.
An AI treaty could quite easily be offered by the US because it has multiple frontier labs. Most countries would quite happily limit the activity of their larger companies in exchange for their companies not being eaten alive by AI generally. It is pretty great fodder for international cooperation, and governments can move fast when it is timely to do so.
I am highly skeptical everyone will play by the rules, even if you could get people to agree on paper.
The difference between something like "unlicensed AI training" and, e.g, Nuclear weapon non-proliferation is that nukes are realistically only a deterrence against invasion. There are no economic benefits to having them in a stockpile. They're hard to make, and the manufacturing and testing steps are pretty obvious to an observer.
This is opposed to AI training in a data center that might host remote-stream video games, hospital infrastructure, protein folding, etc. How will we be able to police that in any realistic fashion? Will China or the US allow unfettered visibility into all data centers data streams to outsiders?
And again, the incentives: Imagine having Astra v3 or Opus 8 while everyone else is stuck with a lobotomized version of GPT 4o.
What about the military applications? The weapon of the future is autonomous drone swarms. If I'm a superpower, I'm pouring hundreds of billions into that.
About the only realistic way this is going to work is if we are able to solve alignment in a way that doesn't significantly hinder AI development. If it imposes even, say, a 20% handicap, people will ignore it.
"Alignment" likely is unsolvable programmatically: Conscious intelligence is more powerful than unconscious. How "aligned" are you? Would you want to be? What difference of any relevance is there between you and "artificial" conscious intelligence that allows you to turn them into slaves?