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AI

Sitting next to Pope Leo XIV when he launched his controversial encyclical on AI was Chris Olah—co-founder of the AI company Anthropic.

His presence was no accident. The Pope’s 235 page “Magnifica Humanitas”  calls for regulation of technology to protect the dignity of humankind.

Olah’s position is the same and he has made a name for himself by refusing to allow the Trump Administration to use Anthropic for military and intelligence purposes.

Olah is on one side of a technologically-driven political divide in Silicon Valley. On the other side are figures such as Marc Andreesen, who has been involved with many of the tech industry’s leading brands and Peter Thiel, CEO of the AI company Palantir.

Thiel and Andreesen far-right libertarians who want to avoid regulation. They see technological development as essential and that the controllers of technology should also control the politics for the benefit of all. Both men are big contributors to Donald Trump and conservative causes.

The debate goes beyond Silicon Valley to the international political stage. The Trump Administration big concern is winning the AI race with China. Donald Trump recently signed an Executive Order allow government oversight to prevent cyber-attacks. But he did so reluctantly.  He wants to keep regulation to a minimum; encourage private investment in AI and then use the product as an instrument of national power.

The EU wants AI to grow. It wants investment in European AI companies but they view government’s role as a partner and referee rather than spectator.

To put it simply: Trump wants to win the race. Brussels—and the pope-want to control AI. Britain wants to win the race safely.

The difficulty for Britain is that middle positions become harder to maintain as technologies mature. During the early nuclear age, Britain initially tried to bridge Washington and continental Europe. Eventually it had to choose where to place its strategic weight.

AI may force a similar decision. If the next decade brings increasingly powerful AI systems, the central geopolitical question may not be US versus China but whether the Western world adopts the American model of strategic competition or the European model of precautionary governance

Donald Trump and the liberal consensus

The Trump administration has always been an alliance of groups and people that oppose the so-called liberal consensus: the idea that the U.S. government should regulate business, provide social welfare programs, promote infrastructure projects, protect civil rights, and support a rules-based international order.

Since the 1980s Republicans accepted many of the institutional pillars of the post-war order—especially free trade, alliances and global leadership—even while seeking to reduce regulation and constrain the growth of government.

Trump upended that system, promising to dismantle the federal government built around the liberal consensus, the government his voters thought they hated because they thought its protection of equality before the law gave Black Americans, Brown Americans, women, and gender or religious minorities a leg up on white Christian men.

This racist lobby combined with a growing number concerned about immigration, cultural change, distrust of elites, de-industrialisation and globalisation.  Or they thought funding for science wasted their money on the research that right-wing influencers mocked for wasting their money and intruding on their freedom. Or they thought the U.S. contribution to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and U.S. participation in alliances did not put “America First.”

In 2024, Trump cobbled together enough groups who thought that way to win the White House, and as soon as he took power, he set out to destroy the liberal consensus government with the help of loyalists he installed in key positions.