I've Got Questions with Sinead Bovell - How AI is Creating A New World Order with Ian Bremmer

Episode Date: May 5, 2026

In this episode, I sit down with world-renowned political scientist Ian Bremmer to explore how artificial intelligence could reshape global power. For decades, world order has been defined by nation-states, the U.S., China, and shifting alliances between countries. But Ian argues we may be overlooking something far more disruptive. In this conversation, we unpack what AI could mean for geopolitics, the U.S.–China rivalry, and a future where the most powerful actors may no longer just be countries. Ian argues we urgently need to rethink what governance looks like in this new world, and the steps we can take to build it. Ian Bremmer is the president and founder of the world-leading political risk research and consulting firm, Eurasia Group. You can catch Ian’s weekly public television show GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, where he breaks down the world's biggest geopolitical stories with the leaders and thinkers shaping them. Want more Ian Bremmer? Catch his weekly public television show GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, where he breaks down the world's biggest geopolitical stories with the leaders and thinkers shaping them. And if you prefer your global politics with a side of satire, check out Puppet Regime — featuring world leaders as puppets. Yes, really. Follow Ian and stay up to date: Ian’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianbremmer Ian’s X: https://x.com/ianbremmer Ian’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ianbremmer/ Ian’s TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ian.bremmer Ian’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Ian_Bremmer Ian’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ianbremmer GZERO World & Puppet Regime: https://www.gzeromedia.com/video/gzero-world-with-ian-bremmer/ GZERO Media TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gzeromedia Puppet Regime Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/realpuppetregime/ Follow my work here: Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://sineadbovell.substack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.sineadbovell.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/sineadbovell⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/sineadbovell⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter / X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/SineadBovell⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/Sineadbovell⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@sineadbovell

There may not be a superpower in the 21st century. How do you put into context the U.S. and China competition? Does everybody have that competition wrong? It's the Americans saying we no longer want to be the global policemen. The Chinese are absolutely competing with the United States technologically, and in many ways they're winning. Is there a world in which there is a lot of truth to that AI race? Because by leading an artificial intelligence,

you do become the de facto global leader. I think it's the most important medium-term question out there. It's almost certain that almost anyone that uses AI regularly will end up having the most important relationship in their life with AI. There is a world in which the most powerful entity is no longer just a country, but an AI company. In less than until there is an existential threat to the US government perceived from these companies, it is likely that they will be writing their own rules.

So you may not like a world where technology companies become sovereign in determining outcomes for AI. You will probably have virtually nothing to say about whether that will happen or not. So the stakes are truly existential. Today, I'm sitting down with Ian Bremmer, who's one of the most influential political scientists in the world. He is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, the world's leading global research and advisory firm. He holds a master's and a doctorate in political science from Stanford. He's the author of 11 books and currently teachers at Columbia University School of International and Political Affairs. So Ian is going to help us make sense of the world artificial intelligence is landing in,

and just how important it's going to be in what happens next. I'm Sinebeauvel and this is I've Got Questions. I want to dive right into how the temperature right now. I think for a lot of us we feel the sense of deep uncertainty and this uneasy feeling like we're on the precipice of something. But for so many of us, we don't know what to put on the end of the end of us. side of that sentence. So you are one of the most influential geopolitical thinkers in the world. How would you define the moment that we're in and what might be coming on the other side of it and why there's such a heightened sense of uncertainty? I guess I see it in two different ways.

The first is that it's cyclical. We have gone through long cycles many times before where the rules of the road that we're used to geopolitically, the way the world works, is no longer aligned with the balance of power. And when that happens, suddenly you get a crack. You get what I call a geopolitical recession or a G0 world because the powers, the major powers, aren't willing to continue to accept that dynamic. Now, sometimes that's because a rising power

is threatening to the leading power. And the leading power is trying to, hold on. In this case, it's because the leading power doesn't actually want to continue to play by its own historic rules with its own historic institutions. But it's not something the world has never dealt with before. It's because when you came out of World War II and a lot of the institutions and the rules that were set up that got us globalization and increasingly goods and services and ideas and people moving faster and faster across borders all over the world, a whole bunch of people in the United States said, we're not going to accept that anymore.

They let the Chinese into the WTO, assuming that China would become much more American. They're not. And Americans aren't happy about that. And Americans themselves have this view that, well, why are we supporting open borders and immigration and free trade? And why are we providing? military security for allies around the world. We don't believe that we benefit from that. So that's leading this geopolitical fissure. And there are really only three ways out of it. The first is that you reform your existing institutions so they better reflect the new balance of power. The second is you create new institutions that are more relevant for today's order, emerging order. And the third is you go to war. Those are your only options, right? And

And we're actually doing all three right now. But I said that there were two ways of looking at this. That's the first way. Second way of looking at this is that at the same time that we're having this cyclical geopolitical recession and that we will emerge from it very differently than the old Cold War or the brief U.S.-led superpower order, at the same time, we have this new set of technologies.

that are completely upending the way power is distributed, the nature of power globally in the hands of countries, companies, individuals. And that's happening so much faster than the underlying geopolitical shifts. It's happening so much faster than the underlying environmental and ecological shifts that we thought were the biggest issue for decades now, really not, right? And people are scared of that. Some people are scared and excited because they see the opportunity. Some people are scared and really want to stop it because they think it's destructive to them and to things that they value. And it's really hard to handle both of those things simultaneously. be a lot easier if the technological change, the revolution of AI, were coming at a time of geopolitical

stability. If this came, if the same tech change had come in the middle of the Cold War, we'd understand much better what kind of institutions we would have and need to engage with. If it happened in the early 90s, it'd be a lot easier to deal with. It's the fact that it's happening at a time that we don't really trust our existing leaders and institutions, that's a really serious problem. So, I mean, I wish I could have had an easier answer to what seems like a very straightforward question. But I think it's precisely that the answer is really itself conflicted between these two different trends that makes it so hard for people to come to terms with. Yeah, we're on the precipice of, on the one hand, on the precipice of an industrial

revolution and probably the most significant complex technology we've ever encountered. And at the same time, in one of the most complex geopolitical environments that our institutions were not designed for, they were largely designed on the backs of the last 70 years. You said something, you said a geopolitical recession, which is, I think what you also describe as a G-0 world. For anyone that hasn't heard that term before, in simple terms, what does it mean to be in a G-0 world? It means that there's an absence of global leadership. The United States, which is the world's only concentrated superpower, so it can project military, financial, technological, and diplomatic power globally in a way that no other country can. Some countries can project some of those aspects, but none can project all of them. The U.S. no longer wishes to serve as the global power, the global leader. but no other country or group of powers are willing or capable of taking its place. And so a G0, instead of a G7 or a G20, whenever G2, if the U.S. and China came together,

whenever we think about these global confabs of countries coming together to provide leadership, a G0 is an absence of that leadership. And, you know, I was just looking down at those Artemis photos as the United States sent a rocket up, a manned and rocket around the moon and came back. And it was so spectacular and looking at our planet. And, you know, if aliens ever were to have that view of our planet and they were aware of these incredible new technologies that we have, the thing that they would most notice, I think, about society is that we have nowhere close to the governance required to actually constructively handle these changes. Like just nowhere remotely close.

It doesn't make us bad people. It's just we're at the wrong point of the cycle. You know, I mean, we really, we clearly need a way to engage. people around the planet to both use these technologies to benefit the 8 billion people that are here to reduce poverty, to improve education, to improve healthcare. But we also need it to stop us from blowing ourselves up, either individually or collectively. And we have nothing, as we've seen with Anthropic over the past few weeks, right, we have literally no capacity, literally. Literally none right now in terms of global governance to deal with global technologies. And I say this as someone

who rejects globalism. Because globalism is this, you know, ideology over the past decades that implies that if we just let a small number of really powerful people, mostly men, mostly white men, make decisions for the way the world should work, that it'll all be just fine. That has been decisively rejected by most of the billions on the planet. That's not what it's about. But that doesn't mean you reject the idea of global governance. Ultimately, we share more as 8 billion people on the planet than we do with the country that we happen to be born in or make citizenship out of. And the technologies that we are discovering and improving require we do a better job of that.

And I suspect that's why you and I met through the United Nations because we both think that that's important actually. Technically, I mean, the UN is the only place left where all countries, whether they are at war or not, still convene. And I think that that's one aspect of why it is still important. And so what you're describing is the reason why we wake up, you check the news and it feels like within 24 hours, you are in a different world. And that's because this is what it feels like to live under a changing world order. And when you see countries like Canada, pivot away from

the U.S. towards Europe, or you see these new trade corridors, the Middle East, Europe, India, this is the hallmark of a world where there's no prevailing order. And every country is trying to secure its best deal with whomever it can, wherever it can, because there is no global architecture anymore. And that's truly what it feels like to live in a moment where there is no global superpower, at least not one that's choosing to be in that role. Not one that's choosing, one that is seen as unreliable. And the Canadians have made that very clear. And in part, they've made it very clear because they're the country that knows the United States the best. They digest all the American media. They mostly live in this tiny strip just above the United States. So, I mean, like everything

that happens in the U.S., the Canadians really get early, you know, let's say the future is here, but it's not evenly distributed. The Canadians see the American future well before lots of other countries do. But to give you some good news, the response of the rest of the world is not we want to throw this stuff out. The response to a United States that's saying we don't want to do this stuff is, okay, well, we still actually find these institutions we have valuable. Let's not throw them away. So you'll remember when Trump was at Davos and he created his board for peace and all of the world's most important leaders showed up on stage to say that they were, you know, supportive of him like Paraguay and Azerbaijan and Mongolia. The Chinese immediately said no. And they said no because they're not

interested in jettisoning the UN. They want to, if the U.S. isn't going to participate, they want to be the most powerful country in the U.N. And when the United States is putting tariffs that are the highest we've seen in 90 years on the Canadians and other countries, their responses are, okay, how do we get better free trade agreements with other countries? If you're going to build a wall, we're going to build roads that are going to allow us to continue to engage in commerce. So it is not becoming a beggar thy neighbor, everybody throws out these institutions. It's not just the law of the jungle. It's a whole bunch of other countries that don't want a Cold War, don't want to pick sides, want to continue to benefit from a lot of the globalization that has ushered in a period of the greatest progress

and human development and wealth and lack of predation that our world has ever experienced in an industrial age. There is that great misunderstanding that if the U.S. pulls resources away from somewhere we can say the United Nations for this example, that it's just going to be a vacuum and that is not true, then how do you put into context

the U.S. and China competition that everybody references? Does everybody have that competition wrong? Because it seems like in the world you're describing, there may not be a superpower in the 21st century because the one that currently possesses. the equipment to be the superpower is rescinding the offer. And the aspiring global power, if we can call it that? Well, can you even be a superpower in a G-0 environment or are the forces

of fracture too great for any one country to dominate in the 21st century? Well, again, it's more complex than that. There are lots of ways to talk about this issue. One is that the Americans have the global reserve currency. The Chinese aren't close to that in 10 or 20 years perhaps, but certainly not today. They're not willing to take the risk of the capital flight that would occur, of the instability politically that could occur if they were to make their currency convertible. And so the structural global financial institutions, architecture and currency, that remains the U.S. dollar. No one else is close. and American allies are becoming asymmetrically weaker than the United States, especially technologically. That really matters. The Chinese are absolutely competing with the United States technologically, and in many ways they're winning, and longer term, that really matters. And I'm sure we'll talk about that. But militarily, the United States has the only global defense capability that can be projected in every corner of the world. China has increasingly a strong Asian security capability,

which would give the Americans a run for their money in much of Asia, but not outside that. They're building a global nuclear force. They're not there yet. And so you wouldn't call China a global superpower, even if they had the intention of that fight. Also, the Chinese do not have an electoral cycle that they are forced to ensure that Xi Jinping. with an underperforming economy is, you know, and he would, his polls would surely not be great right now. The Americans are distracted in Iran. The Europeans are distracted with Russia Ukraine. What a great time to go into Taiwan, not what he's doing at all. What he's doing is long term. This guy got rid of term limits. He's thinking about 10 years down the road. What are the

low risk, no regret moves that I can make that will put us in a much better position versus the United States and everybody else in 10 years? And that implies the technological investments they're making. That implies the engaging with Taiwan and the opposition party, the head of the Kuomintang, who was just invited to Beijing two weeks ago, to help think about how they can improve their ability to control Taiwan long term without firing a shot. The U.S.-China relationship, when Trump became president, he hit the Chinese hard. We saw that on Liberation Day with essentially a trade bond.

boycott, and then he learned quickly that the Chinese had both the capacity and the willingness to hit back the Americans hard, not only with equivalent tariffs and an equivalent boycott, but also squeezing the critical mineral and rare earth supply chain that would shut down American corporations. And immediately, Trump found a way to back down. And now you see Trump speaking quite favorably about the Chinese leadership, looking forward in glowing terms, to even talking about a G2, which doesn't exist in which the Chinese reject in the upcoming summit that still looks to occur. But the U.S. and China right now, at least, are trying both of them to find a level of stability and not fight a Cold War. And then the final point here,

and I intimated this earlier, is that despite a level of decoupling between the U.S. and China, and structurally, we do see that happening, especially in the technology space. We see the Americans responding with their own state investments in rare earths and all of this. Longer term, you could imagine a fragmentation between a U.S. and Chinese-led technology blocks, but other countries around the world are doing everything they can to resist that Cold War. They want to have relations with both the Americans and the Chinese. And in some cases, that's a security relationship with the U.S. and an economic relationship that's more dominated by the Chinese.

You see a lot of that. In Asia, for example, in Mexico, it's overwhelmingly U.S. sure. In Cambodia, it's overwhelmingly China, sure. But for most countries around the world, it's both. And nothing about the GZero world that we're seeing today is reduced. that desire to hedge. In fact, it's strengthening the desire to hedge on the part of all these countries. And so that's why I believe that at least for now, framing the world as a new cold war between a U.S. and a Chinese-led block is really a misnomer. It's not at all

where the world is right now. This is not what they call a Thucydides trap, you know, frequently where you have a changing global order, it'll be because the lead power is in decline, the secondary power is rising, the lead power's hanging on to its own order, but it's harder for it to do so from a power perspective. That's not at all the case. The Americans are not in decline geopolitically.

Again, if you look at American AI and defense, it's the other, it's the allies that have been underspending, their productivity is lower, their growth is lower, their demographics are collapsing. Look at the Europeans. Look at Japan. Look at South Korea. No, it's the Americans in a position of comparative strength vis-a-vis its allies saying we no longer want to be the global policeman or the architect of free trade or the promoter of global democracy. We are unilaterally withdrawing from our own institutions. The UN was an American. American creation. And now we're saying we don't want to do that anymore. And the Chinese are not the

ones that are saying we want to create an alternative post-American order. They're actually saying we're willing to be responsible stakeholders of these old institutions that you don't care about anymore, United States. The Americans pulled out of the World Health Organization. The Chinese immediately said, we'll spend more. We'll spend more because we don't mind capturing that institution for ourselves, you know, you don't want to attract people, the top talent in the world to your university is great. We'll attract them to ours. Canada understands that too. So it's, in some ways, there are silver linings that the response to the United States becoming the principal driver of geopolitical risk and uncertainty globally, the response to that all over the world has been much more

stabilizing and much more resiliency building, even though not coordinated, even though not incredibly capable, the impulse has been, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. So let's throw AI into this mix then. How does AI complicate this dynamic? Because it seems China is playing a really long-term game here. But if you were to think about 10 years, even five years into the future, and this technology could create more asymmetric power advantages, is there a world in which there is a lot of truth to that AI race, because by leading an artificial intelligence, and for however long you can lead in that,

you do become the de facto global leader in some ways because you do hold that technology. What happens when we put tech in the mix of this? Yeah, I think it's the most important medium-term question out there. And for now, it means that allies of the United States are in a horrible predicament, because on the one hand, they don't trust the United States government. Many countries, you saw Macron, the French president, who is prone to speak in exaggerated terms geopolitically, but basically said the Americans, the Russians, and the Chinese are all opposed to Europe.

And that's not really true in the sense that NATO still functions. You've got the, you know, the intelligence is still shared, the interoperability. of the military capabilities remains there, the basing agreements, all that stuff, right? But still, there is this fundamental lack of trust, this idea that the Americans will make decisions that are against the interests of their allies, and they'll do so unilaterally, right? Not only will they not take advice, but they won't even give you a heads up necessarily, right? And yet at the same time, the United States is now driving these technologies that are not only essential for future growth and productivity and power.

But they're also essential for basic national security. So again, when you see the mythos announcement and you see the U.S. government immediately saying, oh, this is structurally really important. And so they call Ann Powell, the Fed chief, and Bessent, the Secretary of Treasury, immediately calls in 40 essential companies and says, okay, we got to share this with you internally to make sure that you identify any potential software vulnerability so we can then patch those things. Okay, well, who was calling the Canadians? Who was calling the Europeans? And would they even accept that call? Would they trust the Trump administration? So what happens when they are

nowhere close to the Americans on AI? The only other alternative is China who they don't exactly trust more than the Americans. They still trust the Chinese less than the Americans. Even Canada, trust the Chinese, I assure you, less than they trust the Americans, as angry as they are with the United States and with Trump right now. They still trust the Chinese less. So what are they going to do? Because right now, they don't have a credible third way. Now, if you ask about five to 10 years out and you're closer to AI on the technological developments than I am. I'm looking at the geopolitical aspects. But, you know, you and I both know that there's an open debate about whether AI is eventually going to be a decentralized technology that's driven primarily in the hands of

individual entrepreneurs, vibe coders, agents that are deployed by those people, or will it continue to be about the most advanced LLMs and those who control the platforms? Just given the way power works, I'd probably make a bet on the ladder, but I don't think I'd make a confident bet on the ladder because the technology is changing every day. And so it might be that in five or ten years time that this U.S.-China AI race becomes much, much less relevant, and then all these countries have a shot. But let's be clear, that doesn't mean they should be investing in sovereign AI, because if that's the model, then they've just wasted a whole bunch of money and resource in something that's going to become completely commodified. And if it's the U.S. and China

it ends up controlling everything because they're ahead and you can't catch up. Then you're wasting a lot of money to just be farther and farther in second place. It's not relevant. So I think that the idea that these countries are going to develop a capability that truly competes with the top Chinese and American companies and platforms, that is a fool's errand. And geopolitically, that is a very hard message to deliver to the so-called middle powers right now because the middle powers do not have an AI play for geopolitical hedging in this environment. They just don't have all. This is an extraordinarily complex technological and geopolitical environment, especially

when you look at it from the perspective of an American ally or wherever they stand today. Because on the one hand, you have American tech companies that an ally would depend on more so probably than China. So in that scenario, you do want to make sure AI stays and somewhat under a liberal democracy. You would feel theoretically better, but that's not guaranteed. There is a very plausible scenario where the U.S. rips an AI technology from its ally if they don't get along with it. And we saw that with Anthropic. America didn't agree with its own AI company, and it put all sorts of problems in front of Anthropic. So on the one hand, you don't, you want to control where AI is coming out of so you can at least have a shot at control

the technology, but there's also this strange other scenario that you've discussed where there is a world in which the most powerful entity is no longer even just a country, but a company, an AI company. And so the instinct may be, well, okay, well, we can't let that happen. We have to do everything in our power to stop it. And I, of course, would never want to live in some fake pseudo-democracy where I'm reporting to some unelected tech leader. But it's also not as simple is saying, okay, stop AI in this moment. We can't let that world happen. Because as you said, we have to first understand what is the security we depend on when it comes to these tech companies, how much of our national security is deeply coupled with them. And then there's the also

plausible scenario that the leading AI company isn't even one in America or in a liberal democracy. It's out of China or somewhere else. And if it is in China, it's inherently coupled with the Chinese government. So how do we navigate this scenario? Who navigates this scenario and with what moves? There is a big difference, even though they feel somewhat similar, between the U.S. technological system where the companies have essentially captured the regulatory environment. So they're deciding, they're acting with functional sovereignty over the models. They're deploying what they do, what their priorities are.

in a sense, it matters at this point less that they are in a democracy or not than what their business model is. That determines the product set and how you as a consumer as opposed to a citizen will interact with it, within it, be productized by it, you know, etc., be surveilled by it, and so forth. And the Chinese system where the state captures those corporations and determines who the national champions are to what aim, what their algorithms are allowed to do and not. Now, it is certainly true that when Anthropic discovered that it had this model

that was potentially existentially threatening to any infrastructure with software, they then decided, and some of this could be marketing, some of this could be overstated for their own investment purposes. I would not completely discount that. But even if it's not, that model is coming in six more months, even if it's not here now. So it's a real problem, right?

It's a real issue. They then decide that they're not going to release it publicly, which they had every capability in doing, though I'm a little less worried about that because if they really thought it was a threat and they had actually released it, the legal liability they would have had in response would have brought down the company. So, I mean, you need, if you have any capacity as an organization, you need to recognize that it's not just about regulation. It's also about legal liability. Those things, legal liability functions as a regulation when regulations don't work.

So capturing regulation is not the only thing that matters. But anyway, so they now are working with the U.S. government and they're saying, let's make sure that, like, the right companies have this capacity so that we're not releasing it irresponsibly. But what we know is that the American government is essentially being purchased, being coin operated by these companies that have lots of money and that can ensure that every senator, every member of the House is lobbied by them with big checks to do, to ensure that there's no regulatory environment that's problematic to them. So for the time being, unless and until there is an existential threat to the U.S. government perceived from these companies, it is likely that they will be writing their own rules, writing their own regulations. And that means that they're going to have different priorities because they have different business models, different funding models, different funding needs, different competitiveness. And sometimes your business model changes when you think you're running out of money. you have to do different things. Google cannot be evil,

but then they have to be a little evil because their business model changes, right? Because they don't have as much cash. All of that kind of stuff. When those things happen, then suddenly you need to think about which company do I align myself with. Right?

Because we all have views. When we talk about geopolitics, talk about the world order, we all have views of what we think about China, what we think about the United States. We like one, we don't like the other. Maybe we like the European model more. Some countries are rich.

some are poor, some are more open, some are more clothes. But we don't have those conversations when we talk about companies. We basically think, well, they all just want to make money. Yeah, but they make money with different business models doing different things. Some are B to B, some are B to C, some are more short term, some are privately owned. What about the people that run them? I mean, Twitter was very different under Dorsey than it is under Elon Musk with different priorities, with different political sensibilities, with different demands and outcomes.

So if you are a foreign government and you believe that the future of AI is likely to be more driven by companies in the U.S. than by the government, then you should be making a bet on one, two, three of those companies that you believe are aligned most with what your own government, your own people stand. with your own national priorities, or you believe that by buying a piece of them, or by giving them benefits that you do not afford to other companies, that you can align their models more with you. So there, if you're the Europeans, right, the interest should be less in how you create your own national champion or how you change your regulatory structure to make it tougher for these companies to operate. It should be, how do we make one of the American.

companies also act as a national champion for the Europeans. Do we buy a piece of them? Do we take a minority share? Do we give them some kind of preferencing and try to get them to establish a headquarters that will do X, Y, and Z within our own domicile? Because they are a geopolitical actor. And they will act with sovereignty, no matter where they are, if they have that capability. And so you need to align yourself with them. You need an alliance with that company. the way you would have an alliance with the United States and NATO. But not with another company. I do not yet see governments acting that way.

But in a techno-polar world, they will need to insofar as we are talking about American companies. Chinese companies, different story, right? And if your bet is that the Chinese are ultimately going to win because they have the scale, they have the long-term model, they'll have the cheaper energy at scale, then all this goes away because then the Chinese government and the companies are going to be together aligned and they're going to win. And by the way, that's plausible. I wouldn't yet make that bet. But certainly the trajectory, the momentum is moving more towards them, even though the Americans have had very, very significant ex-ante leads in so many of these areas.

So I want to make note of what you said about there's a very plausible world in which China leads in AI and technology. And I want to come back to that to hear your take on what that would actually mean for people living under that world so people can have some context around it. But what you're also saying is there's actually a better, a good case, a better case scenario. And the event that an American tech company gets so big and so powerful, if you're Europe or if you're Canada, that's actually a better scenario for you because then you can in some ways benefit from that global structure of that company because it isn't so beholden to the U.S. because it is so powerful, and every country is going to need AI in some way for economic security and national security. So there's a world in which you want an American company to get really big for your own security. But then there's also this strange scenario where we don't want it to get too big that we all inherently have a de facto Wall Street optimizing leader running our world.

So how would you frame it for someone that's thinking, I don't want these AI companies to get too big? but then how do I make sense of the role they're playing in economic and national security? And how does that differ if I'm an American or if I'm a European and Canadian? Well, the first thing you want to recognize is what you want may have very little to do with what is happening. You know, it's like it's like Trotsky used to say you, sometimes you may not want war, but war wants you. Right. I mean, as an analyst, so much of what I do is try to recognize when my personal, interests and preferences have nothing to do with where the world is going. I don't like the G0. The world doesn't care if Ian Bremmer doesn't like the G0. The G0 is coming, right? And that's

been true for that's been clear for over 10 years. So you may not like or want a world where technology companies become sovereign in determining outcomes for AI. You will probably have virtually nothing to say about whether that will happen or not. So, So given that, the question is, what are you going to do about it? Because I recognize that when you start talking about companies as exerting sovereignty, these are very different governance models. Companies are not set up to take care of citizens. They don't, I mean, they frequently treat citizens as customers, as clients.

Sometimes they treat citizens as products. So that's already problematic. And some of these companies are actually large. largely owned by or have special shares for an individual. One guy, it's almost always a guy, right? Who knows what they want and they can change? And we see that, you know, the wealthiest in the United States right now, these are the wealthiest people in the world

and how little they seem to care about the well-being of people as a whole, how little they donate of their money to humanitarian causes, like 1% if you're Elon Musk or you're Jeff Bezos or you're Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, it's a rounding error. obviously these are not people that we think of as global citizens, right? Their global capitalists. But how do you align them with the interests of your government? I mean, we already see it's hard to do that with the United States.

When a new president comes in, okay, Trump's only there for another four years. And then, you know, the Europeans, the Canadians are hoping that, well, a lot of the institutional connections will still be there. How much do you believe that's true with the leader, with the owner of an individual company. So, but the questions are, what are the incentives that you can put in place? What are the structural controls you can put in place with a company? Through an equity investment, through your own government's regulations, through tax preferences, through product alignment, right? I mean, you want to essentially, you want to look at the leadership, the business model,

what it is that the AI does. Again, these companies are not the same. If it's obvious. Like if you're the Europeans, there's a reason why you would do a deal. You would do an alliance with the United States and not with China. That's less obvious today than it was 50 years ago, but it's still pretty obvious. Well, similar things are true for how one would go about creating, let's not, you don't have to call it an alliance. We can call it a strategic partnership. But if technology companies are becoming geopolitical actors, we're talking about alliances.

How do you create collective security between a government, a non-U.S. government and an American functionally sovereign technology company. And those are really interesting questions that governments should start thinking about. And that, you know, frankly, also the billionaires and capitalists in those countries should be aligned with their governments in thinking about, in facilitating. The EU, in principle, is in the best position to do this because they are the ones that at scale have some level of economic governance. But on technology, there still is a lack of alignment. And a lot of these countries are doing these things individually as opposed to collectively where they have the market weight, they have the leverage to be able to matter more to a big American platform. And I think you and I both know that there is no institution, no political leader.

that is preparing for, or at least acknowledging the possibility of a world in which an ally or an adversary isn't just a country. It could also be a company. And even if that's not the end state that we want, and I of course don't want to live in that type of a world, by acknowledging it, not acknowledging it, you could be inadvertently sleepwalking towards it. But could you briefly just say, so for anyone that's listening and thinking, well, why is AI even that important? So why do we need to make this type of bargain in the first place? If I'm Europe, if I'm even American, if I'm Canadian, why is this the biggest deal? Why even need to go down this path? I mean, we should at some point get back to this whole idea that none of the governance that we have right now is remotely suitable for 8 billion people on a planet, all of whom are increasingly interconnected, right?

So the idea that we're split into all these little countries and that there's nothing supranational that works to help ensure that people are taken care of, that is like anyone that looked at this planet from outside. would say this is really dysfunctional, right? So let's recognize that we're not, we're not thinking about optimized governance for eight billion people. And my ex ante assumption is those, those eight billion people all have worth. You know, it's not just the people that happen to be born with the right passport that have worth. Yeah. And we're not going to last as a society for very long when destructive technologies are in the hands of people that don't have effective governance and are left out by people with power, the whole thing is going to blow up if we don't fix this faster than that, right? But leaving that aside, I think it's almost certain that within five years, and maybe within

one or two, almost anyone that uses AI regularly will end up having the most important relationship in their life will be with AI. It will that AI LLM bought virtual thing, whatever you want to call it, will have more knowledge of us, more capacity to engage with us, be more connected to us real time, surveil us, preempt our needs, do work for us than any other relationship we have. Not a doctor, not a lawyer, not a teacher, not a family member. And that, when you think politics describes how society has relations with each other, not just about governance. Politics is about individual human beings engaging with each other.

That is about to be intermediated by AI. It is about to be subsumed by AI. So all politics will become AI infused, engaged, adjacent, impacted. Again, within certainly within five years, but maybe faster than that. So it's almost impossible to consider governance in the next iteration of what comes after this G0 world without understanding. how AI is going to impact it. And so, and if you control those algorithms, if you're the one that's programming them, even though you might not be aware that you have the power to determine those outcomes,

you do, right? You may not know what that power will do. You may not be even thinking about the second and third order implications of it. You may only be thinking about the money you want to make because that's your business model. You just want to productize it, just want to ensure that people are engaged with it, addicted to it, giving you more data, things that you can sell or spending more money on compute and intelligence. But it doesn't matter. What you're doing with the power is of second order importance to the fact that you have it. An understanding of geopolitics must first start with who has power.

Who has power? And then you look at, of those that have power, what are they doing with it? What are their intentions? Are they short term? Are they long term? How do they prioritize those things? Are they effective, right? Or are they kind of incompetent?

Then you do those things. But first, you look at who has power. And when I look at the next five years, who has power are the people that control these AI. That's it. That's where we're going. Some of that will be governments. some of that will be countries. I hope a lot of that will be people, right?

I hope, but I don't know. Again, you and I, I think would like it more living in a place where people had a lot more access to AI. But we wouldn't like it if there was no governance around that because some of those people are really dysfunctional and angry. Right? And it does it, as we've just found out from the Strait of Hormuz, it takes a relatively small number of angry people. without even much resource to seriously cripple a $110 trillion global economy, right? Now put AI into that mix. We are not going to make it if we don't figure this stuff out.

And I think the only way to put some context on it for someone that's listening and still not grappling with the role AI will play in our life, what if a single person or company owned electricity, the internet, and your laptop? and you did or didn't get access to all of that as a package. That is the significance, I think, and maybe even more that AI is going to play in our world. It's more because right now, even if you don't have electricity, people still think of you as a fellow human being. Sometimes not very empathetically, but they still do. If you don't have AI in five or ten years' time, you won't even be engaging with other human beings. on the planet. I mean, people, we're heading towards this hybrid intelligence capacity where we're going to start dehumanizing those that don't have it. So in other words, then the people that

control AI, whether it's company or government, decide if you're off of it, are effectively dehumanizing you. I don't know how to describe it more clearly than that. The stakes are truly existential. So when I look at current governance models, whether it's a global governance model, whether it's from a country, none of them are sufficient for this moment. Doesn't it mean we have to pave an entirely new path here? And it actually can't and shouldn't come down to any one person. It really is an 8 billion people initiative if we want to make sure this works out for everyone. So it's not even just what is democracy 2.0. It is what is this net new structure that we want to build? What is a step we can take? I mean, in your hypotheses, what could that look like and who should be taking it? So I've spent a lot of time with the UN Secretary General over the last almost decade talking specifically about these issues. I think that there are three different types of governance that are required. It makes it a lot easier when we talk about the specific

pieces that we really need and we need them now. The first should be super obvious is right now, there are two countries that are dominating the opportunities, but also the threats that come from advanced AI, U.S. and China. And Trump is about to meet with Xi Jinping. And there is really no part of that conversation that is about arms control of AI between the two countries. We had a smaller version of this between the Americans and the Soviets in the nuclear days. And there was an arms race It was unconstrained until we almost blew each other up in 1962 in the Cuban Missile Crisis. And then after that, we said, oh, we need a hotline. Now we need arms control.

Now we need to talk to each other. No, no, no, no. We cannot wait until that kind of a crisis on AI. So the first kind of governance we need, we desperately need. We need it like yesterday is we need a U.S.-China AI arms control dialogue to lead to agreements. What are the things that we must engage with together to ensure we do not blow each other up with AI. That's number one. Number two thing we need, and this is clear from mythos and anthropic, is that we need to see AI in some ways as a more holistic version of the financial

markets. We all need the financial markets. We all know that we need it, and we all know that any market participant can potentially pose a systemic threat. to the viability of the financial markets, right? Through misinformation, through a market run, through a collapse, you name it. And when that happens, you have a financial stability board that identifies threats, communicates them to actors that can all have the capacity and the responsibility to ensure the stability of the global markets. And that's true, by the way.

You feel that way if you're the head of the PBOC in China, if you're the Bank of England, the ECB, the Fed doesn't matter, right? you need an AI stability board. You need a group of actors, public and private sector, that have the ability to identify a mythos-type threat from whatever corner, as soon as it occurs, inside a company, acting in a rogue way from an individual, you name it, communicates that to the actors globally that matter,

and then have the ability to react to ensure the sanctity and stability of the system. That's the second kind of governance you need, an AI stability board. And the third kind of governance you need is you need to ensure that AI is available to people around the world. You need some kind of AI fund, right?

And that doesn't just mean everybody gets like a smartphone with AI on it. It means like Africa needs electricity. If Africans don't have electricity, they're not going to have AI. And it is utterly urgent. because it's not just a digital divide. Again, a digital divide led to big gaps in globalization,

led to, you know, the Danny Roderick globalization elephant that showed like the extraordinary hump of the top 0.1%, the big emerging middle class, but then a whole bunch of people that were like still left behind. We can't afford that with AI. So you have to be able to take the profits of these capabilities to ensure that human beings around the world have access to the most extraordinary ability to improve their human capital

and to do it without even having all of the infrastructure built around it. The leapfrogging capabilities of people with AI can be extraordinary in a way that is much harder to do with advanced medicine today, with advanced education today, because you can do it virtually with these tools, but you've got to get them access. And we don't have the money for that right now. We don't have the system for that.

I think that if you were to start with those three capabilities, that would be a really significant move to create the kind of governance that ultimately we're going to need to make it through what should be the most positive transformative moment that humans have ever seen. And is there anyone, any government,

any group of people that can be taking that step? If anyone's, can anybody be voting in a certain way, petitioning in a certain way, who is best in position outside of just the tech leaders to mobilize some of this? Well, I mean, what you saw with the anthropic U.S. response initially was a component of that because of a threat. And so I do think that a lot of this will be developed, induced by threats. And I hope the threats will be small enough that we can use them constructively, right,

and take advantage of them as opposed to, you know, be debilitated by them. And, you know, so the U.S. private sector, some of them can be a component of this. Influencers that are out there. I mean, I wouldn't bother with any of this if I thought it didn't matter. But I've had these conversations not just with Antonio. I've had them with Christine Lagarde at the ECB. I've had them with a number of heads of state. All of the Nordic leaders, for example, every single one of them. I've had it with a number of Europeans, the Japanese, the South Koreans. So it's not, and a lot of American political leaders, probably 20 senators. So, I mean, you know, individuals that have access to these people or that have big platforms

can make a difference, right? I mean, I think Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, former executive chair of Google, he's worth tens of billions of dollars. He's been driving a lot of the U.S. China component, was doing it with Kissinger. until Kissinger was 100 years old, brought him over to China and was facilitating that conversation. Kissinger's gone now. Eric doesn't have that, that, you know, access himself to the Chinese leadership. No one does, frankly, the way that Kissinger did. But you can, you know, continue to pursue that. So there's all sorts of things that can happen here. But I don't think that it is, there's not one

leader that you would say, oh, this is the person that's going to make this happen. I think Pope Leo is inclined on on these issues. And I have not yet met the Pope. And I hope I will be able to specifically on AI because I think that he, what I've seen from his writings and his early interventions on this imply that he really is thinking about this in a constructive way. And, you know, we've got what, some 20 plus percent of America that's Catholic, like a big statement on that from him when he comes to the United States could really matter.

But there's no, you look around the world, it's not like you could just say, oh, if I can only get this person to do this, then we resolve it. We're not there. It's going to have to be built from scratch because the existing, this is the problem. We don't have the existing institutions that people believe in and see as legitimate. Most of the people that voted for Trump were more focused on how democracy was broken. and someone needed to fix it, then people that voted for Kamala Harris, believe it or not, you know, because they were so angry that they thought that the Uniparty, Democrats and Republicans

had just no longer cared about the average American. They were willing to vote for someone that they thought was going to blow the thing up. So that's the environment we're in globally right now. And is there a difference at all in this being led predominantly by China or a world in which it is Chinese companies that kind of take the reins and that is the rollout? Of course. I mean, you know, there's a difference in part because the Chinese are longer term in the investments they're making and appear to be more risk averse as a consequence. That's useful. Of course, that also means you're making a very big bet on eventual stable

succession because we have no idea what comes after Xi Jinping. And we don't. know as she gets older and has all that power, will he start losing capacity but not losing willingness to control, which is super dangerous? When you have someone that has that much control of a system but no longer has the capability to make smart decisions, and at some point, she is going to have to either significantly loosen his grasp on power to facilitate that transition or we're going to be in a very vulnerable position globally. So I worry a lot about the uncertainty of that in an authoritarian system that's consolidated like China. You have the reality that in the Chinese system, AI is going to be

driven much more for national security and for industrial purposes. And they're not going to trust the people as much because they don't want individuals with that level of control over bots that might hallucinate or even worse might get them information on things that the Chinese government finds unacceptable. So you're less likely to have a decentralized AI revolution in a Chinese model than you would in a U.S. model, where a U.S. model, as long as it makes a lot of money for a company, they don't mind if individuals are becoming like much more capable, right? So that's different.

And then you have the values of the government itself and what that would mean geopolitically for what countries are preference and not. If it turns out that the Chinese end up with the best AI, then the companies and the governments that are aligned with the Chinese system are going to be more productive and have more wealth and more opportunities than those that are aligned with American corporates. And that is wholly plausible as we look ahead, say 10 years. And how does what we're talking about here today and everything we discussed connect to the state of conflicts we see in this moment and where those could lead? The state of conflicts, I mean, again, the thing that I think we said that was most relevant here is how the Iranians are much, much smaller than the Chinese, but were able to essentially hit back against the Americans in ways that forced the Americans to back down from escalating.

escalatory threats militarily. The Americans now saying, okay, well, you know, ceasefire. We're not, even though the Iranians aren't engaging in productive negotiations, we're not going back to war. This is the same president said he was going to end their civilization. What happened? Well, it turns out the Iranians have the ability to hit back. Why, asymmetric ability to cause pain. And when I think about AI, AI has the capacity to either empower only, a small number of individuals in governments and in corporations that control that technology, or it could super decentralized and lead to a whole bunch of actors that have more capacity to disrupt. I mean, we've already seen with drone technology that you've got unmanned drones

that have the ability to give the Ukrainians a fair fight against a much bigger, much wealthier Russia, with far more people, right? And now, I mean, the Russians can barely put people on the front lines because they'll get picked off by Ukrainian drones. And increasingly, Europeans need Ukraine, more than Ukraine needs Europeans. That's new. That's technology. That's not directly the AI revolution. Some of it is targeting and data. But in the next few years, AI will be essential there. And so if AI becomes something that relatively small, not super wealthy actors can deploy in ways that has deterrent value that can cause massive damage, then they're going to be able to defend themselves. And some of them will be able to act like rogues to influence and ensure their stability the way that heretofore really only nuclear. nuclear powers could, say the North Koreans, right? I mean, this this suddenly creates a very different

club of countries that have and non-country actors that have deterrent capability. And I'd be remiss if I had you on the line and didn't ask what everybody who's listening right now is thinking. Could we be headed for a much more globally involved conflict in the near future? And if we are, what would we be fighting for? I think the answer to that in the near future is no, because the reaction to the United States acting more unilaterally and mostly focused on its own backyard. And Iran is a big exception, but also a big mistake. And Trump, even though he won't publicly admit it, understands that, is that this is not a U.S. that is itching for World War III. And as I said, the responses to the U.S.

acting unilaterally in a bullying fashion is that other countries don't want to blow this up. So the Chinese are not looking to escalate against the U.S. The Chinese have ability to hit back against the Americans. And so now Trump is deferring more to Xi Jinping and trying to ensure that there's stability and detent between the two countries. Look, I think that if the Ukrainians are able to use their technology to hit the Russians. back hard, especially as Putin is not getting any younger and is making some decisions that are very bad for his country, you could see the Russians use a nuclear weapon against Ukraine in the worst case scenario. And that would be utterly horrible, even worse than all of the war crimes we've

seen perpetrated against the Ukrainian people. And yet, it is hard to see that leading to World War III. Right. And so, yeah, I think that the worries I have have more to do with the fact that we're unleashing these new technologies that we don't have governance around and they can potentially collapse a market. They can potentially undermine security, lead to an assassination of a major leader, that kind of thing, precipitate something much more dangerous. I see that as a bigger concern than the structural. regional conflicts that exist today around Ukraine, around Iran, around Taiwan. I don't see any of those emerging into global conflicts, but I do see new technology actors having the potential that precipitate something much greater, much more painful. And in the event that we want to look for, examples of leadership in this moment with the leadership we do have that show we are at least some people trying to take the right steps. what are those signals that we can see that we could be steering off towards a road that we actually do want to walk down and one where democracy is at least preserved?

I think the fact that Trump is failing in his political revolution because he has decided that he matters more than the American people. So his focus so much more on the kleptocracy, for example, and on decisions that are at odds with, with the outsider anti-establishment view that he took when he first came in, the drain the swamp reality, that is going to lead to an outcome in the midterms that will be a decisive repudiation of Trumpism, of putting himself over the country, Trump first as opposed to America first. I think that is a positive sign that the American people are angry for good reason, but they ultimately want a political revolution that's constructive, not destructive. They want them, one that benefits them. I think the tech lash that we're seeing in the United States is an understandable

response to a winner take-all model. And people don't like data centers because they don't believe that they're going to have opportunities. As they start believing they'll have opportunities, they're going to feel more like the global South who see AI as a constructive force, see AI as an opportunity for them to do better, even as they don't control it, even as they have fewer opportunities than Americans, they think their trajectory has more potential. So you need people that believe in the American dream. Ultimately, the last time America went through this was the Gilded Age. And the Gilded Age ended with a depression, but also with a political revolution, with FDR.

And FDR tried to do some illegal stuff. He tried to pack the court. He failed. He tried to purge his own Democratic Party illegally. He failed. But he did do some things that were revolutionary that mattered for the country. This was the New Deal. This was the creation.

of a professionalized administrative state with rule of law that built infrastructure in the country that allowed a middle class to emerge and made the Americans stronger for generations. And that form of political revolution Americans want. And frankly, so do a lot of Europeans. Frankly, so do the Canadians. So are the South Koreans. So are the Japanese. So, I mean, I think that ultimately the hope comes from the people.

comes from the reaction of the people. And those people do have the ability to drive market forces. Okay, in a case-shaped economy, so much of the market forces are being driven by a very small percentage of really wealthy people. But ultimately, companies will not succeed if they're only benefiting a small number of really wealthy people. You need the actual human capital of societies to coalesce for these companies to do well. And even if Elon and Bezos today do not recognize that, their successors will.

So that to me is where the hope comes from. Yeah. Yeah. There's a world in which it's a breakdown, but there's also a world in which this is the breakthrough. And we hope it's the latter.