In 2025, there will be a course correction in AI and geopolitics, as world leaders increasingly understand that their national interests are best served by the promise of a more positive and cooperative future.

The post-ChatGPT years of AI discourse can be characterized as somewhere between a gold rush and an ethical panic. In 2023, at the same time as record investment in AI, tech experts, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, published an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on training in AI systems that are more powerful than GPT-4, while others compare the AI ​​to a “nuclear war” and a “pandemic.”

This has understandably clouded the judgment of political leaders, pushing the geopolitical conversation about AI into some disturbing places. At the AI ​​& Geopolitics Project, my research organization at Cambridge University, our analysis clearly shows a growing trend towards AI nationalism.

In 2017, for example, President Xi Jinping announced plans for China to become an AI superpower by 2030. The Chinese “New Generation AI Development Plan” aimed at the country reaching a “world-leading level” in AI innovation by 2025 and becoming a major AI innovation center by 2030.

The CHIPs and Science Act of 2022—a US ban on semiconductor exports—is a direct response to this, designed to take advantage of US domestic AI capabilities and deter China. In 2024, following an executive order signed by President Biden, the US Treasury Department also published draft rules to ban or restrict investments in artificial intelligence in China.

AI nationalism portrays AI as a battle to be won, rather than an opportunity to be exploited. Those who favor this approach, however, would do well to learn deeper lessons from the Cold War that go beyond the idea of ​​an arms race. At that time, the United States, while pushing to become the most technologically advanced nation, was able to use politics, diplomacy and statecraft to create a positive and aspirational vision for space exploration. Successive US governments have also managed to get UN support for a treaty that protects space from nuclearization, declares that no country can colonize the moon, and ensures that space is “the province of all peoples. “

That same political leadership lacks AI. By 2025, however, we will begin to see a shift back in the direction of cooperation and diplomacy.

The AI ​​Summit in France in 2025 will be part of this transition. President Macron has already changed his movement away from a strictly “security” framing of the risk of AI, and towards one that, in his words, focuses on more pragmatic “solutions and pattern.” In a virtual speech at the Seoul Summit, the French president explained that he wants to tackle a wider range of policy issues, including how to ensure social benefits from AI.

The UN, which recognizes the exclusion of some countries from the debate around AI, also released in 2024 its own plans aimed at a more collaborative global approach.

Even the US and China are starting to get involved temporary diplomacywhich established a bilateral consultation channel on AI in 2024. While the impact of these initiatives remains uncertain, they clearly show that, in 2025, the world’s AI superpowers are likely to continue with the diplomacy of nationalism.