Reports of an artificial intelligence arms race are everywhere—even in this very publication. But what if that framing is fundamentally dangerous?
That’s Verity Harding’s conceit. Between 2016 and 2020, Harding spent her days briefing politicians across the globe, from Barack Obama to Emmanuel Macron, on advances in AI. As the head of global public policy at Google DeepMind, Harding was responsible for mapping out ethical conundrums and potential risks. Back then, she told WIRED in a recent interview, AI research “was rooted in international cooperation.” But somewhere along the way, the industry began to be shaped instead by rivalries—between individual labs like Anthropic and OpenAI and between two global superpowers: the US and China. The AI arms race became the metaphor du jour.
In a new essay anthology curated by Harding, Reframing the AI Arms Race, she and other figures from 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 casting AI as a lethal weapon risks closing the door to the kind of international cooperation required to ensure that the technology is safe and its benefits are evenly distributed. For smaller powers that import the technology, meanwhile, conceding to the arms race framing means lining up behind one superpower or another, potentially against their own interests.
Harding sees the Trump administration’s nationalist AI rhetoric and its bid to impose export controls on homegrown models as symptoms of the arms race framing—and evidence that a worst-case scenario is taking shape.
WIRED met with Harding in early June to discuss where the arms race idea originated, how the narrative is shaping geopolitics, and what smaller countries might do to guarantee 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 metaphors of war with respect to AI?
VERITY HARDING: I just think it’s a sexy framing. It’s one of those things that feels very clarifying, but if you dig deeper, it restricts your thinking.
When I was at DeepMind, the job was to try to help political leaders to understand the technology and what it would be capable of. It was rooted in the idea that the technology was really exciting, but there were also things to be concerned about that would be more appropriately dealt with in a collaborative, international way. What I started to notice [over time] was this notion that it was more of a civilizational battle: the West versus China.
What were the forces behind that shift?
One was a sincerely-held belief that the technology was dangerous—or would be in the wrong hands—and therefore that democracies should hold the keys.
The other was an anti-regulation stream, [for whom] it was beneficial to point to China as a bogeyman: “If you regulate us, you let China win.”
Would you point to any particular moment as a trigger?
ChatGPT [launched in November 2022] suddenly made a lot of people pay attention to AI. But other things happened at the same time.
ChatGPT emerged at the same time as a global pandemic, when people were freaking out about the borderless world becoming bordered again, and the war in Ukraine, when a lot of the discussion about AI and geopolitics—but particularly weaponry—suddenly became very real.
It very quickly became accepted wisdom that AI is the new arms race. It was mapped onto the last arms race in living memory, the Cold War; people talked about it as akin to a nuclear weapon.