Roles at 18 players

Objective: preserve US security, prevent catastrophic AI failure, maintain legitimacy.

Responsibility: Final authority for US public posture, emergency powers, treaty authorization, and nationalization decisions.

Objective: coordinate US grand strategy across labs, allies, military / intel, and China.

Responsibility: Coordinate US grand strategy across the President, military/intelligence, allies, labs, and China backchannels.

Objective: preserve public trust, legality, institutional continuity, and market stability.

Responsibility: Own legality, public legitimacy, communications, market reassurance, and institutional continuity.

Objective: maintain deterrence and protect critical national-security systems.

Responsibility: Own military posture, deterrence, strategic warning, command resilience, and military AI requests.

Objective: provide attribution, detect model theft, protect systems, and expose manipulation.

Responsibility: Own attribution, model-theft investigation, counterintelligence, cyber defense, and classified confidence judgments.

Objective: preserve the lab's ability to shape frontier AI safely and responsibly.

Responsibility: Own lab survival, board/investor posture, government negotiation, and final business-side deployment or pause commitments.

Objective: keep the lab technically ahead while producing useful systems.

Responsibility: Own training runs, compute allocation, model deployment mechanics, scaffolding, and technical progress tradeoffs.

Objective: prevent loss of control, model theft, deceptive deployment, or reckless use.

Responsibility: Own model evals, safety/security evidence, shutdown recommendations, insider threat, and whistleblower escalation.

Objective: prevent US AI dominance, preserve sovereignty, and maintain domestic stability.

Responsibility: Own China's top-level political strategy, sovereignty posture, domestic legitimacy, and final state commitments.

Objective: manage China's AI catch-up, domestic adoption, and external image.

Responsibility: Own China's tech policy, domestic stability, foreign messaging, industrial mobilization, and treaty drafting posture.

Objective: prevent adversary military-AI dominance and maintain regional deterrence.

Responsibility: Own PLA posture, theater deterrence, military AI demands, and pressure around regional flashpoints.

Objective: secure Chinese interests through intelligence, counterintelligence, and covert leverage.

Responsibility: Own intelligence, covert action, counterintelligence, cyber leverage, deniability, and attribution fog.

Objective: advance Chinese frontier capability and produce strategically useful systems.

Responsibility: Own DeepCent capability progress, compute use, eval posture, distillation, and military integration tradeoffs.

Objective: prevent reckless US-China racing and create legitimate international governance.

Responsibility: Own allied diplomatic legitimacy, safety standards, treaty convening, sanctions coordination, and democratic oversight demands.

Objective: use allied compute, chip supply, cloud infrastructure, and eval capacity to stabilize the crisis.

Responsibility: Own allied compute/chip leverage, cloud restrictions, technical verification, eval certification, and infrastructure hardening.

Objective: prevent a US-China AI condominium and secure fair AI access for non-aligned states.

Responsibility: Own non-aligned legitimacy, fair-access demands, compute/talent bargaining, and South Asia stability pressure.

Objective: exploit great-power distraction, avoid marginalization, and gain access to AI capability.

Responsibility: Own deniable opportunism, sanctions evasion, disruption, leak amplification, and black-market AI access bargaining.