When I was growing up, the most alarming technology was nuclear weapons. As a student, I lived with a family in Hiroshima who had been there when the bomb fell. As a young reporter, I interviewed many more eyewitnesses to the horror that ended the second world war. I even met a man, Yamaguchi Tsutomu, who had survived the blasts in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Looking back, the nuclear age seemed more predictable than the present. Only a few governments had the bomb. The stand-off between the West and the Soviet Union was scary, but both sides had an existential reason not to start a nuclear war. People worried that a terrorist group might get its hands on a nuke, but they are hard to build. And there was never any question of the missiles developing minds of their own. 

The geopolitics of AI are different. As the technology rapidly grows more potent, a worrying number of AI agents are escaping from their creators’ control. Boosters hope that AI will one day eliminate scarcity, but many in the industry fear there is a non-trivial chance it could eliminate humanity. Serious people, including the boss of Anthropic, are calling for a slowdown and stronger guardrails. 

Yet, as our cover package describes, such wise caution clashes with power politics. America and China are in an AI arms race. Both governments believe that, as Donald Trump put it, the country that wins AI wins, so to slow down the development of frontier models would be to court defeat. President Trump says the only guardrail America needs is “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT”, namely himself. It is not only Democrats who are sceptical of his approach; so are an increasing number of Republicans. As we argue, the future is fraught with danger (even if AI models are getting better at predicting it). Keeping the technology safe and keeping ahead of China are hard and contradictory goals. And for once, the journalistic cliché that “the stakes could not be higher” is actually true.  

On The Insider this week, our editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes, and colleagues report from Ukraine, where an AI-and-drones arms race is shaping the conflict—and offer a warning to Europe about what to expect in a world of rapid innovation and minimal regard for the rules of war.