Ferguson and Schmidt cast AI as an imperial technology

In a Foreign Affairs essay titled "Empires of AI: The Rise and Fall of a New Global Order", Niall Ferguson, Lisa Klaassen and Eric Schmidt argue that artificial intelligence is not a general-purpose technology on the pattern of electricity or the internet, but an imperial one, and that the United States and China are the two emergent empires contesting it.

"Control of frontier AI and its rewards are concentrated in a handful of firms in China and the United States," they write. "Everyone else is a dependent user, whether a government running public services on a model it cannot inspect or a firm building products on an interface that can be repriced or withdrawn overnight."

The authors lay out the asymmetry between the two powers. China has abundant electricity and a near-global monopoly on rare-earth elements the AI stack relies on, yet cannot manufacture leading-edge chips. The United States has the world's best semiconductors and frontier models, yet lacks minerals, and its aging energy grid cannot support the needs of its vast network of new data centers. One empire, in their framing, is short of watts; the other is short of transistors. The named chokepoint is TSMC, the Taiwanese semiconductor producer, which sits 90 miles off the Chinese coast. Four of the AI figures in our Who's Who passed the piece around on the day it ran.

The essay closes on capital, not capability. "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," the authors write.