New Delhi, July 16 (IANS) As the Western powers aim to harness AI to gain a strategic advantage in the new world order, the fact that this game-changing technology is currently concentrated in the hands of private companies has emerged as an important issue on how governments deal with the new technological landscape, according to a new report.
This was highlighted at the G7 summit in France last month where the leaders of the world’s largest AI companies sat alongside heads of state and government to discuss technology, security and the future of Western power.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman held bilateral meetings with G7 leaders and other invited heads of government, following an agenda and protocol normally associated with state actors. Others, including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, were central figures in discussions about the technological leadership of democratic countries, an article published by PRF (Politeia Research Foundation) points out.
“States retain political authority, regulatory power and control over military force, yet depend on technological capabilities they often neither develop nor own. For alliances, this dependence creates an additional problem: integrating technologies produced by private actors and subject to national jurisdictions into collective security structures,” states the article authored by Emanuele Rossi.
The AI industry operates across borders, and emerging security architectures require ever deeper technological integration. However, control over the most advanced capabilities remains national and can be exercised unilaterally when governments judge their security interests to be at stake.
Currently, the US has control over the AI technology and had earlier imposed restrictions on sharing it with other countries. For US allies, the question therefore concerns the predictability of access to technologies on which an increasing share of collective security may depend, the article observes.
It also points out that the cyber security chiefs of the Five Eyes intelligence partnership have warned that the rapid development of frontier models could render existing cyber risk assessments obsolete “in months, not years”. Their concern was the growing capability available to adversaries.
The same uncertainty is evident in assessments of the distance between US and Chinese models. The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) has estimated that ‘DeepSeek V4 Pro’ trails leading American frontier models by about eight months, based on its own benchmark suite. Results published by DeepSeek, using different tests, instead place the model close to US systems released roughly two months earlier, the article states.
Beijing is accelerating the integration of AI into military capabilities, spanning logistics, decision support, and autonomous systems. The challenge for the West, therefore, is that technological advantage must be preserved while governments and alliances seek to convert it into operational capability. Yet, the time required for the second process may exceed the duration of the first, the article added.
–IANS
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