For decades, Europe let Silicon Valley run the machinery of its governments. American companies handled the email, the cloud storage, the video calls, the documents, the servers, and increasingly, the intelligence systems that process sensitive public data. This arrangement was sold as efficiency. As a matter of geopolitical reality, it was dependence. That arrangement is … Read more

The Second Lock Germany lost a Security Council vote it had never lost before. The number it received is a confidential audit of its standing — and a quiet refutation of the case it makes for permanent membership. There is one sentence in the post-mortems that does more work than the result itself. As the … Read more

Reframing Intelligence in the Age of Artificial Systems In June 2022, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine told The Washington Post that the company’s language model, LaMDA, had come to life. “I recognize a person when I interact with one,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if they have a brain made of flesh or a … Read more

Why the Country With the Best Model May Still Lose There is a comfortable story Americans tell about the race for artificial intelligence. In that story, the contest is a sprint, the finish line is the most powerful model, and the United States is winning. The story is not wrong, exactly. By most public measures, … Read more