International Law Cannot Prevent Extinction Either

The context for this post is primarily Only Law Can Prevent Extinction, but after first drafting a half-assed comment, I decided to get off my ass and write a whole-assed post.I agree with Eliezer's main thesis that individual violence against AI researchers is both morally wrong and strategically stupid. Where I disagree is with the claim that international law can prevent extinction. It can't, for the following reasons.I. International law is largely a fiction (especially when interests diverge sharply)The analogy with nuclear weapons is a poor one. North Korea signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and developed nuclear weapons anyway. The treaty deterred only those who weren't very motivated anyway. And the reason why the US and Russia didn't nuke each other has nothing to do with international treaties (see point II).In practice, powerful countries disregard international law whenever they want. A stark example of this is the Budapest Memorandum: in 1994, Ukraine surrendered all its nuclear warheads in exchange for written sovereignty guarantees from Russia, the US, and the UK. Russia annexed a part of Ukraine in 2014, and the international community expressed concern. Russia launched a full-scale invasion in 2022, and the first thing the international community did was block the bank cards of anti-war citizens fleeing Russia. No military intervention ever materialized. Putin is doing just fine.There are no stable enforcement mechanisms to address violations of international law. This is not a world of parties engaging in good-faith negotiations. It is a world in which Putin, Xi, and Trump treat international commitments as an empty pretext to show off in front of the cameras.II. The AI race is perceived as asymmetrical, unlike nuclear MADThe proposed AI treaty is compared to nuclear non-proliferation, but the underlying incentive structures in these two cases differ radically.As Eliezer noted, neither Soviet nor American leadership expected to have a good