TL;DR: You (Yes You) should prepare for a “February 2020” moment where suddenly AI policy becomes the most important issue in the world. You should be ready to take action if and when it does, in a detailed way. ( Epistemic status: originally written for an event in early 2026; have heard from some folks that they found planning processes inspired by this memo very helpful for the smaller-scale OpenAI / Hugging Face response, so very quickly redacting a few things and posting this as-is.) Many people in the AI policy space assume that eventually we’ll be at an Overton Window-shifting crisis moment, that opens the floodgates for the really good policies all along that we had. But when you look at successful handling of crisis moments, there was no time to think – people applied strategies they’d learned via academic study or previous professional work, and then moved against them rapidly. For example, after 9/11, the US government operationalized past reports on intelligence and law enforcement reform and institutionalized them into law (good?) [1] and also picked an enemy to fight based on past history, Iraq (bad). Or in the 2008 financial crisis, Ben Bernanke brought deep academic experience studying financial panics and the Great Depression, partnered with Tim Geithner and Henry Paulson’s market and policy experience and deep networks. Or in 2020, Anthony Fauci essentially cashed in 30 years [2] of epidemic-fighting expertise and relationships in one go (whether well or po…

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