THE GLOBAL AI race has entered a new, existential stage. Anthropic CEO’s idea for international cooperation is a step in the right direction. But it is vulnerable to potential weaponization. What’s urgently needed is multipolar AI cooperation.
On September 14, AI-linked stocks tumbled after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei appealed for the AI industry to “slow down,” and executives of other AI giants seconded him.
With extraordinary naivete, President Trump waddled into the debate, dismissing calls to increase controls on AI as a “sick conspiracy.” Meanwhile, the UN Security Council was preparing to hold a meeting on AI.
What is driving the current AI race is big money, and an assertive effort by the White House to dominate this new general-purpose technology – as if any single country could no longer control the emerging global AI ecosystem.
Massive investments
Global AI investment reached $581 billion in 2025 and is on pace to exceed $1 trillion in 2026. The United States captured over 79% of global startup funding.
U.S. private AI investment skyrocketed to $286 billion in 2025 (and is projected to double this year), driven by tech hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Broader AI infrastructure spending is expected to scale even higher.
U.S. is followed by a combination of state-backed initiatives and growing private ecosystems in China, Europe, and the Middle East. China recorded $12.4 billion in private AI investment for 2025. Total spending is significantly higher due to state-run guidance funds, which deployed some $184 billion into tech firms.
In Europe, the UK leads in private AI investments with $4.5 billion. Yet, continental Europe relies heavily on state interventions.
Middle Eastern powerhouses are leveraging sovereign wealth funds to position themselves as foundational infrastructure hubs.
Canada ($2.4 billion pledge), India ($1.25 billion project), South Korea, and Japan are expanding their localized AI capabilities to prevent total reliance on U.S. architectures.
Overcoming existential threats
Last year, ex-OpenAI employee Daniel Kokotajlo reportedly spooked Vice President JD Vance with the release of “AI 2027,” a nightmare scenario of AI race between the U.S. and China is likely to lead to human extinction or power concentration.
In July, Kokotajlo’s nonprofit, AI Futures Project, published a new vision for the future with a more upbeat ending. The scenario “AI 2040: Plan A” recommends a way to avert the doomsday scenarios.
The plan requires an international deal that delays the development of AI. It it is predicated on the idea that the world’s two AI superpowers would agree on radical transparency.
Industry insiders have been invoking “AI 2027″ with increasing frequency as adverse forecasts have come to pass.
Unipolar moment with AI characteristics
To contain potential existential risks, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has proposed a three-step framework in his recent essay “We Must Pace the Frontier,” Amodei proposed a three-step international process:
- Embedded third-party evaluators with employee-level access inside frontier AI labs to review training alignment, assess safety practices, and report critical incidents. (Anthropic committed to this step unilaterally.)
- Western industry coordination via common, shared safety standards and mutual caps on the speed of capability advancements among leading AI labs located within “democratic countries.”
- International coordination – including with “authoritarian countries” like China – to implement cross-border verification and state-level risk limits.
The severity of recent incidents has aligned normally adversarial AI leaders, leading to broad consensus in a matter of days. But the Amodei plan has its discontents.
Designed for U.S. purposes, the first step, though international by aspiration, is effectively barely national by scope.
In its current form, step 2 fosters the perception that the strategic goal is to slow AI development under the terms of the mainly U.S. AI giants. They would share a knowledge base, whereas the Global South is largely ignored.
Thus, the impression is that step 3 will prove rather shallow because critical decisions will be made within step 2.
Toward multipolar solution
In Washington, the executive branch has downplayed calls for a forced slowdown, which is perceived as a concession to China. Conversely, many lawmakers are treating the Amodei plan as a wake-up call. Despite the alarm, the U.S. has no federal, broad AI legislation.
Amodei’s proposal explicitly argues that a Chinese lead in AI would pose a “grave danger for the United States and the world.” It is reminiscent of the Cold War, when an external threat was inflated to ramp up U.S. technological supremacy. Hence, the Chinese criticism of the U.S. AI “Cold War playbook” designed to contain China’s tech sector rather than genuinely govern AI.
Unlike such unipolar solutions, multipolar approaches might offer an alternative perspective. Ultimately, neither Washington nor China can contain the broad emerging global AI ecosystem. But together, the two could rally the international community into effective deployment of global AI, through three vital initiatives.
- U.S. should enlist the full support of advanced economies, via the G-7 nations, while China could rally the support of large emerging economies, via the BRICS.
- The shared AI platform would have to be adequately broad to enlist the perspectives of all multipolar economies and sufficiently specific to be effective.
- A continuing negotiating mechanism would be vital to build consensus approaches that serve multipolar AI regulatory goals – not this-or-that nation’s unilateral economic or military interests.
But what if U.S. AI giants and administration insist on unipolar prerogatives?
Buildout minus guardrails
In a likely scenario, a multipolar buildout would happen anyway, as US-led think tanks, risk consultancies, and macro-investors acknowledge.
AI infrastructure becomes globally dispersed. The U.S. maintains software dominance, but sovereign networks thrive. The Middle East becomes the primary physical data center hub due to abundant energy, while East Asia controls advanced manufacturing. Fragmentation raises baseline supply chain costs, but cushions local economies against a centralized tech monopoly.
In this scenario, every country wins less and loses more. Existential risks are likely to climb, especially when AI is purposefully weaponized.
Should doomsday catastrophe evolve, perhaps it will be legitimized as inevitable collateral damage for freedom and democracy.
Dr. Dan Steinbock, an expert on the multipolar world, is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/ He is also the author of multiple works on global tech innovation and the ICT sector.
