The Opacity Trap: Why States Wait to Govern Emerging Technologies

Arms control overwhelmingly concerns technologies that states already possess rather than those they might one day develop. Why do states prefer to control today’s technologies tomorrow instead of controlling tomorrow’s technologies today? I argue that technological secrecy produces an opacity trap: states must conceal technological details that could betray important discoveries to rivals, but mutual secrecy obscures who is actually ahead. Thus, the very secrecy states need to compete is also what blinds them to whether technological competition is worth preventing. I formalize this logic with an endogenous learning model, showing how the information needed to make anticipatory control attractive usually only arises through competition itself. By the time states realize they are ensnared in unwinnable competitions, the technologies they are competing over have already been produced. The theory is tested with archival research into two little-known cases—environmental-modification weapons and deep-sea missile launchers—alongside original data on nearly 250 weapons governance agreements since 1850. The findings explain why states can foresee the dangers of emerging technologies yet still fail to govern them in advance, with implications for contemporary efforts to control technologies such as artificial general intelligence (AGI).