The Question That Won’t Go Away Every few months, the question comes back around. Is the chatbot conscious? Will the next model be? How would we know if it were? You can read a hundred essays on it and walk away with the same uneasy feeling you started with, because nobody can answer the question … Read more

Greenland, Davos, and the Alliance After the Blow When Donald Trump first floated the idea of buying Greenland in 2019, most observers treated it as an eccentric aside. Trump returned to the subject immediately after winning re-election in November 2024, and this time the framing was different. He was no longer musing about a real … Read more

Russia’s AI Supply Chain and the Architecture of Its Development Partnerships Russia entered the artificial-intelligence era with the rhetorical ambition of a great power. Its National AI Development Strategy, adopted by presidential decree in October 2019 and substantially revised in 2024, pledges to raise AI’s contribution to Russian GDP to eleven trillion rubles by 2030 … Read more

Russia’s playing its own game in developing and integrating AI. Its strongest capabilities lie in applied, state-backed, and dual-use AI systems rather than in creating globally leading foundation models or in the compute ecosystems required to sustain frontier research at scale. The core pattern is strategic adaptation rather than frontier leadership. Russian institutions are trying … Read more

My article, “U.S.–Gulf Trades for AI Expansion,” was about more than sovereign wealth, datacenters, or regional tech ambition. Underneath all of that, it was about relocation—physical, legal, and political. On the surface, the piece describes a new bargain. The United States brings the stack: chips, models, cloud ecosystems, and the regulatory power that comes with … Read more