A huge amount. People traditionally think about tech coming along and changing society, but the reverse is also true. You can really see that happening with AI right now.
The political culture in the US is having a huge impact on how AI policy turns out and thus how AI turns out. The geopolitical environment is very tense and febrile at the moment. A lot of that is down to the US taking a more isolationist approach.
Tell me why you advocate for an internationalist approach to AI development and against the idea of individual countries turning inward to develop the technology themselves.
I think sovereign capacity in Europe and the UK is really, really important.
[But isolationism] has just become the only driving force in AI policymaking and obscures other possibilities and other realities.
Even the US and China can’t develop everything themselves, which means you’ve got all of these strategic chokepoints: “You can’t have our chips.” “Well, you can’t have our critical minerals, or our scientists—and we won’t buy your product.” It’s unrealistic to suggest that every country can have their own completely sovereign AI stack.
It’s easy to see why European powers might worry about their dependence on American technology, though. In the last two weeks, Donald Trump issued an executive order on AI dripping with nationalist rhetoric, and his administration effectively forced Anthropic to withdraw its latest frontier model from the market.
Yes, definitely. But the internationalist approach isn’t in opposition to the sovereignty argument. The argument could boil down to: Competition is normal and healthy but doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive with collaboration and cooperation.
I’ve been calling for a middle powers coalition. It’s partly about leverage. It’s partly about scale.
Say it was Canada, France, Japan, South Korea, India, and the UK. India has incredible scale and diffusion of technology; the UK has incredible talent and an advanced startup ecosystem; Canada has critical minerals, [and so on].
The point is to not allow the arms race framing to convince you that the entire game of AI is a binary race between two superpowers. By believing it to be true, you make it true, turning yourself into a small chess piece on one side or the other. You are always lesser.
Is money the corrupting influence? Does the popularization of the arms race concept have to do with the emergence of a route to commercializing this technology?
The amount, the speed, and the way money rushed in—the freneticism—definitely had an impact. But in and of itself isn’t enough to account for what we’re seeing.
Do you think the major labs are complicit in shifting the rhetoric from collaboration toward competition?
They are. Talking about AI as an arms race accrues power to them, by saying it’s so powerful, new, and unique, that only we have the answer, and only we should be in charge of the solution.
Does the ferocity of the competition between individual AI labs and between global powers to master this technology necessarily undermine the objective of safe and responsible AI development—or can you have both?
I don’t think the language of a “race” helps anybody to calmly and collegiately plan.
So, if we continue down this road, what is our destination?
The natural long-term conclusion is excessive government control and centralization of power over these systems—and less safe and beneficial systems, because we couldn’t find ways to collaborate on things like security, food security, or ending disease. Then, a lot of vassal states that just have to pick one superpower or the other.
What’s even a small thing for people to work on together, if not totally agree on? The arms race narrative, the competition between labs, the nationalism we’ve seen grow in AI—all of that means that people don’t want to exercise that [cooperation] muscle anymore. You have to keep that muscle working, otherwise it will wither.