AI, Global Governance, and Digital Sovereignty
It addresses the problem of understanding AI's role in international relations for policymakers and scholars, but it is incremental as it builds on existing theories without new empirical data.
This essay analyzes how AI systems influence global governance and digital sovereignty by examining their impact on power dynamics between states and corporations, concluding that AI will embed in governance structures to create complex public-private interactions.
This essay examines how Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are becoming more integral to international affairs by affecting how global governors exert power and pursue digital sovereignty. We first introduce a taxonomy of multifaceted AI payoffs for governments and corporations related to instrumental, structural, and discursive power in the domains of violence, markets, and rights. We next leverage different institutional and practice perspectives on sovereignty to assess how digital sovereignty is variously implicated in AI-empowered global governance. States both seek sovereign control over AI infrastructures in the institutional approach, while establishing sovereign competence through AI infrastructures in the practice approach. Overall, we present the digital sovereignty stakes of AI as related to entanglements of public and private power. Rather than foreseeing technology companies as replacing states, we argue that AI systems will embed in global governance to create dueling dynamics of public/private cooperation and contestation. We conclude with sketching future directions for IR research on AI and global governance.