Policy will not determine the future of AI, Developers are the single most important factor which the AFF can’t control

As if that were not enough, by shifting the structure and balance of global power, AI complicates the very political context in which it is governed. AI is not just software development as usual; it is an entirely new means of projecting power. In some cases, it will upend existing authorities; in others, it will entrench them. Moreover, its advancement is being propelled by irresistible incentives: every nation, corporation, and individual will want some version of it. Within countries, AI will empower those who wield it to surveil, deceive, and even control populations-supercharging the collection and commercial use of personal data in democracies and sharpening the tools of repression authoritarian governments use to subdue their societies. Across countries, AI will be the focus of intense geopolitical competition. Whether for its repressive capabilities, economic potential, or military advantage, AI supremacy will be a strategic objective of every government with the resources to compete. 1}le least imaginative strategies will pump money into homegrown AI champions or attempt to build and control supercomputers and algorithms. More nuanced strategies will foster specific competitive advantages, as France seeks to do by directly supporting AI startups; the United Kingdom, by capitalizing on its world-class universities and venture capital ecosystem; and the EU, by shaping the global conversation on regulation and norms. The vast majority of countries have neither the money nor the technological know-how to compete for AI leadership. Their access to frontier AI will instead be determined by their relationships with a handful of already rich and powerful corporations and states. This dependence threatens to aggravate current geopolitical power imbalances. The most powerful governments will vie to control the world's most valuable resource while, once again, countries in the global South will be left behind. This is not to say that only the richest will benefit from the AI revolution. Like the Internet and smartphones, AI will proliferate without respect for borders, as will the productivity gains it unleashes. And like energy and green technology, AI will benefit many countries that do not control it, including those that contribute to producing AI inputs such as semiconductors. At the other end of the geopolitical spectrum, however, the competition for AI supremacy will be fierce. At the end of the Cold War, powerful countries might have cooperated to allay one another's fears and arrest a potentially destabilizing technological arms race. But today's tense geopolitical environment makes such cooperation much harder. AI is not just another tool or weapon that can bring prestige, power, or wealth. It has the potential to enable a significant military and economic advantage over adversaries. Rightly or wrongly, the two players that matter most--China and the United States--both see AI development as a zero-sum game that will give the winner a decisive strategic edge in the decades to come. From the vantage point of Washington and Beijing, the risk that the other side will gain an edge in AI is greater than any theoretical risk the technology might pose to society or to their own domestic political authority. For that reason, both the US. and Chinese governments are pouring immense resources into developing AI capabilities while working to deprive each other of the inputs needed for next-generation breakthroughs. (So far, the United States has been far more successful than China in doing the latter, especially with its export controls on advanced semiconductors.) This zero-sum dynamic--and the lack of trust on both sides--means that Beijing and Washington are focused on accelerating AI development, rather than slowing it down. In their view, a "pause "in development to assess risks, as some AI industry leaders have called for, would amount to foolish unilateral disarmament. But this perspective assumes that states can assert and maintain at least some control over AI. This may be the case in China, which has integrated its tech companies into the fabric of the state. Yet in the West and elsewhere, AI is more likely to undermine state power than to bolster it. Outside China, a handful of large, specialist AI companies currently control every aspect of this new technological wave: what AI models can do, who can access them, how they can be used, and where they can be deployed. And because these companies jealously guard their computing power and algorithms, they alone understand ( most of) what they are creating and (most of) what those creations can do. These few firms may retain their advantage for the foreseeable future--or they may be eclipsed by a raft of smaller players as low barriers to entry, open-source development, and near-zero marginal costs lead to uncontrolled proliferation of AI . Either way, the AI revolution will take place outside government. To a limited degree, some of these challenges resemble those of earlier digital technologies. Internet platforms, social media, and even devices such as smartphones all operate, to some extent, within sandboxes controlled by their creators. When governments have summoned the political will, they have been able to implement regulatory regimes for these technologies, such as the EU'S General Data Protection Regulation, Digital Markets Act, and Digital Services Act. But such regulation took a decade or more to materialize in the EU, and it still has not fully materialized in the United States. AI moves far too quickly for policymakers to respond at their usual pace. Moreover, social media and other older digital technologies do not help create themselves, and the commercial and strategic interests driving them never dovetailed in quite the same way: Twitter and TikTok are powerful, but few think they could transform the global economy. This all means that at least for the next few years, AI's trajectory will be largely determined by the decisions of a handful of private businesses, regardless of what policymakers in Brussels or Washington do. In other words, technologists, not policymakers or bureaucrats, will exercise authority over a force that could profoundly alter both the power of nation-states and how they relate to each other. That makes the challenge of governing AI unlike anything governments have faced before, a regulatory balancing act more delicate-and more high stakes-than any policymakers have attempted.