There is a moment, when watching a child run towards the sea, when even the most liberal parent feels the need to get up from the deckchair. Not because he wants to stop him from swimming, but because he has finally understood that water is not a blue carpet, but an environment. It has currents, depths, jellyfish and, every now and then, someone who decides to pass too close to the shore with their dinghy.
Something similar is happening with artificial intelligence. For years we have let digital grow like a city built in secret: streets, bridges, squares, entire neighborhoods built by private individuals while the States watched, often with the air of those who think that just arriving at the inauguration is enough to put up a plaque. Then we woke up inside that city and discovered that money, relationships, politics, war, school, healthcare, memory and a non-negligible part of our identity pass there. At that point the ribbon cutting had already taken place some time ago.
Now the Restless Leviathan, as I define the state in my latest book “Widespread Wars”, seems not to want to repeat the mistake. In the United States, at least according to the latest news, Trump signs measures that reject regulations considered too heavy, but at the same time claim federal centrality, American supremacy, national security and strategic use of AI in the military and intelligence fields. On the other hand, some Democratic senators propose limits on military use: no machines called upon to decide by themselves the launch of nuclear weapons, no mass domestic surveillance, no autonomous lethal force without human authorization. In short, two different pieces of music, but played in the same theatre: the State has returned to the theater and no longer intends to remain standing near the exit.
Of course we must not confuse this return with a mystical conversion to prudence. We are not faced with a sovereign who suddenly remembered the rights of his subjects while stroking the cat in front of the fireplace. We are in the presence of a power that has understood something much simpler: AI is not just an industrial sector, it is a lever of control. Whoever controls the models, the data, the infrastructures, the chips, the access rules and the military uses is not the master of a market, but of a part of reality or at least its operational representation, which in the information society is almost the same thing, only with more servers and less poetry.
The difference compared to the original digital is also aesthetic. The Internet, for many years, seemed like a business for geeks, teenagers, enthusiastic advertisers and companies with nice names. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, enters the scene with a more theatrical costume: it writes, speaks, draws, advises, classifies, recognizes, simulates. It does not remain hidden behind harmless icons and this makes it more understandable and therefore more disturbing. An algorithm that optimizes advertising may seem boring; a system that suggests a military target, assesses a risk or participates in the production of public decisions suddenly becomes the stuff of a crisis cabinet.
The real point, however, is not whether the State wants to get back into the game because this seems quite clear. The question is whether the big tech platforms are still mere players or have become owners of the stadium, the turnstiles and perhaps even the scoreboard. Over the last twenty years, big tech, in addition to money, has accumulated infrastructure, skills, data, computing power, collective dependence and an enormous influence on daily habits. Calling them companies is correct on a legal level, but insufficient on a political level. They are private powers with public effects and if once we would have defined them as suppliers; today, in some cases, they look more like digital lords.
This is why the question “will they give in?” it is poorly worded, although understandable. It is not a question of imagining a surrender with a white flag and a handover report. More likely we will see a long negotiation, made up of light regulations, voluntary cooperation, national security exceptions, public contracts, technical standards and some useful declarations on the good of humanity. The State needs businesses because it does not own the machine and businesses need the State because no machine, no matter how powerful, wants to find itself without a license, without energy, without contracts, without geopolitical protection and with too many judges at the door. It will be less of a pitched battle and more of a “family dinner” where everyone smiles while kicking each other under the table.
The price, then, could be that of a shared sovereignty, of a tolerated opacity, of a responsibility distributed to the point of becoming, in the worst cases, unrecognizable. Then, when something goes wrong, the ancient game will always be the same: politicians will say that they relied on the experts, companies will claim to have respected the instructions, technicians will argue that the system worked according to approved parameters, and the citizen will discover that he was, as often happens, the final tester. Free, of course; indeed, paying for the subscription.
There is no need to invoke panic or even wait for the savior. The question is more sober and more difficult: we need rules that are not theatre, controls that are not ornamental bureaucracy, responsibilities that do not evaporate as soon as the word “innovation” appears. AI should not be stopped any more than a power plant should be stopped because high voltage is dangerous. You design it, you isolate it, you monitor it, you decide who can enter the control room and above all you establish who responds when someone gets an electric shock.
Perhaps the Restless Leviathan has finally understood that digital is no longer a toy left in the living room, but the home’s electrical system. It remains to be seen whether he will be able to govern it or whether he will simply argue with whoever owns the main switch. Power, today, does not only lie in who decides where to go: but also in who can take you to that place.
