By Emrys Schoemaker, Executive Director, Global Digital Governance Lab, Global Governance Centre, Graduate Institute; Senior Associate for Digital Policy and Advisory, Caribou.
The case for radical action on AI is often built on an underlying assumption, and that assumption is about to be put to most of the world: that a single, contestable forecast about the technology’s trajectory is already settled, and that on the strength of that certainty, ordinary rules are a luxury and hard bargains the only responsible course. Frederike Kaltheuner has set out how this works in her response to Europe 2031, the much-discussed scenario in which the continent, having failed to secure sovereign access to frontier AI, slides into economic irrelevance and is left with three unpalatable options: become an American protectorate, turn to China, or fade. The scenario is a powerful one vivid and justifies the anxiety. But its sharpest flaw, as Kaltheuner shows, is the frame itself: it treats the market’s evolution as a force of nature to which Europe can only submit on the best terms available, when in fact that market is still being shaped, and perhaps the more important question is by whom.
That diagnosis has broader application than the essay that prompted it. The politics of inevitability is not being sold to Europe alone. Across a single fortnight this July it was put to everyone at once, and the audience least able to refuse it is the one that most repays attention: the middle powers and the Global Majority, the states unlikely ever to host a frontier lab and now being asked, in effect, to choose someone else’s approach to governing AI.
Four governance models in a fortnight
Consider what unfolded between the first week of July and the third.
On 6 July, in Geneva, the UN convened the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance, and António Guterres told the plenary that every nation needs a seat at the table. On 14 July, Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, published a manifesto calling for a US-anchored, industry-funded standards body modelled on FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) – a private AI regulator, financed by the labs, answerable to Washington, that would vet frontier models before they reach the American market. On 17 July, in Shanghai, Xi Jinping personally opened the World Artificial Intelligence Conference and unveiled a new China-led cooperation body pitched explicitly to the Global South. And alongside all of this, running since last December, sits Pax Silica: the US-led coalition binding chips, compute and critical minerals into a single alliance whose membership is conditional on geopolitical alignment, the arrangement that already decides who may buy the compute on which any market runs, and with which Hassabis’s Washington-facing standards body seems, broadly, to align.
These are not versions of a single exchange but a contest between four models of governance – arguably three, given that Pax Silica and Hassabis’ call align – coupling a grip on the supply chain with an industry proposal to write the rules for the market that runs on it. This sets out access as conditional on political alignment, with the terms set in Washington. The Chinese approach arrives in the language of inclusion, courting the Global South with a more equitable-sounding Chinese approach than the Western summits have extended. The UN argues for something neither bloc is offering, a multistakeholder model accountable to all states rather than to one capital or one industry. however, for a capacity-constrained state, the question each poses is the same: which governance approach do I align with, and whose architecture do I legitimate through alignment? That is how the politics of inevitability works at global scale, not by presenting a single offer to accept or refuse, but by narrowing the field to a menu of blocs and letting the narrowing imply that choosing between them is the whole of the available agency.
This is an excerpt. To read the full article, visit The Global.