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In 2025, there will be a course correction in AI and geopolitics, as world leaders increasingly realize that their national interests are best served by the promise of a more positive and cooperative future.
The post-ChatGPT years in AI discourse could be characterized as somewhere between a gold rush and a moral panic. In 2023, at the same time as there was record investment in AI, technology experts, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, published an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on training more AI systems powerful than GPT-4, while others compare the AI to a “nuclear war” and a “pandemic”.
This has understandably clouded the judgment of political leaders, pushing the geopolitical conversation about AI into some unsettling places. At the AI & Geopolitics Project, my research organization at the University of Cambridge, our analysis clearly shows the growing trend towards AI nationalism.
In 2017, for example, President Xi Jinping announced plans for China to become an AI superpower by 2030.Next Generation AI Development Plan” targeted the country to reach a “world leading level” of AI innovation by 2025 and become a major center of AI innovation by 2030.
The CHIPs and Science Act of 2022 – a US ban on semiconductor exports – was a direct response to this, designed to take advantage of US domestic AI capabilities and limit China. In 2024, following an executive order signed by President Biden, the US Treasury Department also published draft rules to ban or restrict investments in artificial intelligence in China.
AI nationalism describes AI as a battle to be won, rather than an opportunity to be exploited. Those who favor this approach, however, would do well to learn deeper lessons from the Cold War beyond the notion of an arms race. At that time, the United States, while pushing to become the most advanced technological nation, was able to use politics, diplomacy and state art to create a positive and aspirational vision for space exploration. Successive US governments also managed to obtain support from the UN for a treaty protecting space from nuclearization, specified that no nation could colonize the moon, and ensuring that space was “the province of all humanity”.
The same political leadership has been lacking in AI. In 2025, however, we will begin to see a change back in the direction of cooperation and diplomacy.
The AI Summit in France in 2025 will be part of this shift. President Macron has already reframed his event away from a strict “security” framing of AI risk, and towards one that, in his words, focuses on more pragmatic “solutions and standards.” In a virtual speech at the Seoul Summit, the French president made it clear that he intends to address a much wider range of policy issues, including how to ensure that society benefits from AI.
The UN, recognizing the exclusion of some countries from the debate around AI, also published in 2024 its own plans aimed at a more collaborative global approach.
Even the United States and China have begun to engage tentative diplomacyestablishing a bilateral consultation channel on AI in 2024. While the impact of these initiatives remains uncertain, they clearly indicate that, in 2025, the world’s AI superpowers will likely pursue diplomacy over nationalism .
