Essay by Niall Ferguson, Lisa Klaassen, and Eric Schmidt: “In the span of a few years, China and the United States have each assembled something future historians might recognize as a new kind of empire. Their dominions extend not merely over territory, trade routes, and airspace but over knowledge itself. By controlling the large language models, chips, physical infrastructure, and capital that provide the foundations for advanced machine cognition, Beijing and Washington are not only attaining new heights of economic performance and power projection; they are also setting the terms of all future scientific and intellectual progress. The term “AI superpowers” fails to capture the influence and reach that these rivals now wield. Even without active alliance building or coercion, they can make all other countries that seek access to advanced AI beholden to them.
Imperial history carries a warning. In the absence of other forces, empires seldom succumb to a challenger or to barbarians at the gates. More often, they fail because defending their vast dominions drains them dry, whether of material resources, the consent of the governed, or the loyalty of elites. The imperial center finds it can no longer maintain control over the periphery—the regions that once submitted to it. Failure can be financial, as it was for the British Empire after 1945, when the debts of two world wars forced London to liquidate its imperial assets to pay the price of victory: a welfare state for the citizens of the imperial metropole. It can be institutional, as it was for the Qing empire in the late nineteenth century, when it failed to industrialize, reform its bureaucracy, and renew the legitimacy of the Manchu dynasty.
Or it can be technological. The Royal Navy’s Dreadnought of 1906 gave the United Kingdom the first “all big gun” battleship and, with the same stroke, rendered its existing battle fleet obsolete. Overnight, this breakthrough opened the way for rivals such as Germany, erasing a century of accumulated British advantage. The resulting arms race forced the United Kingdom to nearly double naval spending between 1900 and 1914 and clashed with the Liberal government’s new social spending commitments, such as the Old Age Pension Act of 1908. The decisive question in the contest between Beijing and Washington may therefore not be who achieves artificial general intelligence first, but who can bankroll the race.
AI is imperial in two ways. On the one hand, China and the United States had empire-like qualities before the AI race began: Washington, the incumbent, pairs global military primacy with an alliance system no rival can match. It also supplies the currency for the lion’s share of international trade and transactions. Beijing, often described as the challenger, combines industrial and supply chain dominance with the world’s largest navy and a tightening grip on the physical and digital infrastructure of countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. For both, AI is a way to extend the power they already wield. But AI is also by its nature an imperial substance. Whoever produces and controls frontier models acquires global leverage over innovation, production, science, culture, and, ultimately, advanced thought. Much as silver underwrote Habsburg Spain and oil defined the “American century,” this new commodity will not merely enrich the powers that dominate it but also provide the basic operating system on which everyone else must depend…(More)”.
