Paper by Jacob Taylor and Joshua Tan: “In the 20th century, international cooperation became practically synonymous with the rules-based multilateral order, underpinned by treaty-based institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. But great‑power rivalries and structural inequities have eroded the functioning of these institutions, entrenching paralysis and facilitating coercion of the weak by the strong. Development finance and humanitarian aid are declining as basic principles like compromise, reciprocity, and the pursuit of mutually beneficial outcomes are called into question.
The retreat from cooperation by national governments has increased the space for other actors – including cities, firms, philanthropies, and standards bodies – to shape outcomes. In the AI sector, a handful of private companies in Shenzhen and Silicon Valley are racing to consolidate their dominance over the infrastructure and operating systems that will form the foundations of tomorrow’s economy.
If these firms are allowed to succeed unchecked, virtually everyone else will be left to choose between dependency and irrelevance. Governments and others working in the public interest will not only be highly vulnerable to geopolitical bullying and vendor lock-in; they will also have few options for capturing and redistributing AI’s benefits, or for managing the technology’s negative environmental and social externalities.
But as the coalition behind Apertus showed, a new kind of international cooperation is possible, grounded not in painstaking negotiations and intricate treaties, but in shared infrastructure for problem-solving. Regardless of which AI scenario unfolds in the coming years – technological plateau, slow diffusion, artificial general intelligence, or a collapsing bubble – middle powers’ best chance of keeping pace with the United States and China, and increasing their autonomy and resilience, lies in collaboration.
Improving the distribution of AI products is essential. To this end, middle powers, and their AI labs and firms, should scale up initiatives like the Public AI Inference Utility, the nonprofit responsible for the provision of global, web-based access to Apertus and other open-source models. But these countries will also have to close the capability gap with frontier models like GPT-5 or DeepSeek-V3.1 – and this will require bolder action. Only by coordinating energy, compute, data pipelines, and talent can middle powers co-develop a world-class AI stack…(More)”.
