Schmidt and Ferguson argue China and US are building 'empires of AI' over global knowledge
josh_wills · x · 2026-10-28
In Foreign Affairs, Niall Ferguson, Lisa Klaassen and Eric Schmidt argue that China and the US have each assembled a new kind of empire extending over knowledge itself. By controlling LLMs, chips, infrastructure and capital, they set the terms of all future scientific progress. AI has an inherent center-periphery structure: frontier AI and its rewards concentrate in a handful of firms, leaving everyone else a dependent user — governments running services on models they cannot inspect, firms building on interfaces that can be repriced or withdrawn overnight.
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