Reports from one The artificial intelligence arms race is everywhere – even in this publication. But what if this representation is fundamentally dangerous?
This is Verity Harding’s imagination. Between 2016 and 2020, Harding spent her days informing politicians around the world, from Barack Obama to Emmanuel Macron, about advances in AI. As head of global public policy at Google DeepMind, Harding was responsible for highlighting ethical conundrums and potential risks. At the time, she told WIRED in a recent interview that AI research was “rooted in international collaboration.” But somewhere along the line, the industry instead became defined by rivalries — between individual labs like Anthropic and OpenAI and between two global superpowers: the U.S. and China. The AI arms race became the metaphor of the day.
In a new anthology of essays curated by Harding, Realigning the AI arms raceThey and other figures across global politics and academia, including historian Lawrence Freedman and Japanese politician Taro Kono, argue that the language used to describe AI sets the tone for policymaking and the terms of engagement between nations.
Harding believes that using AI as a lethal weapon risks closing the door to the kind of international cooperation needed to ensure the technology is safe and its benefits are evenly distributed. For smaller powers importing the technology, admitting that the arms race is being staged means aligning themselves with one superpower or another, perhaps against their own interests.
Harding sees the Trump administration’s nationalistic AI rhetoric and its attempt to impose export controls on domestic models as signs of the arms race – and evidence that a worst-case scenario is taking shape.
WIRED caught up with Harding in early June to discuss where the idea of the arms race originated, how the narrative shapes geopolitics, and what smaller countries could do to ensure they have a say in AI development.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: Why do you think people are drawn to war metaphors when it comes to AI?
VERITY HARDING: I just think it’s a sexy representation. It’s one of those things that feels very clarifying, but when you dig deeper it limits your thinking.
When I was at DeepMind, my job was to help political leaders understand the technology and its capabilities. It was based on the idea that the technology was really exciting, but there were also concerns that could be better addressed in a collaborative, international way. What caught my attention [over time] Was this idea more of a civilizational struggle: the West versus China?
What were the forces behind this change?
One was a sincere belief that the technology was dangerous – or would fall into the wrong hands – and that democracies should therefore play the key role.
The other was an anti-regulation stream, [for whom] It was beneficial to point to China as a bogeyman: “If you regulate us, let China win.”
Would you name a specific moment as the trigger?
ChatGPT [launched in November 2022] suddenly made many people pay attention to AI. But at the same time other things were happening.
ChatGPT emerged at the same time as a global pandemic, when people were upset about the borderless world being limited again, and the war in Ukraine, when many discussions about AI and geopolitics – but especially weapons – suddenly became very real.
It quickly became widely accepted that AI was the new arms race. It has been traced to the last arms race in living memory, the Cold War; People talked about it as if it were a nuclear weapon.
https://www.wired.com/story/verity-harding-ai-arms-race-dangers-anthology/
