Artificial intelligence Emerges as New Factor in Western Alliance

July 17, 2026

As the Western powers aim to harness Artificial Intelligence (AI) to gain a strategic advantage in the emerging world order, the fact that this game-changing technology is currently concentrated in the hands of private companies has become a critical issue in shaping how governments respond to the evolving technological landscape. This reality was highlighted at the G7 Summit in France last month, where leaders of the world’s largest AI companies sat alongside heads of state and government to discuss technology, security, and the future of Western power.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman held bilateral meetings with G7 leaders and other invited heads of government, following an agenda and diplomatic protocol normally associated with state actors. Others, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, played central roles in discussions on maintaining the technological leadership of democratic nations, as highlighted in an article published by the Politeia Research Foundation (PRF).

Although states continue to retain political authority, regulatory power, and control over military force, they increasingly depend on technological capabilities that they neither develop nor own. For military alliances, this dependence presents an additional challenge: integrating technologies developed by private companies and governed by different national jurisdictions into collective security frameworks.

The AI industry operates across borders, while emerging security architectures require increasingly deeper technological integration. However, control over the most advanced AI capabilities remains national and can be exercised unilaterally whenever governments consider their security interests to be at stake.

At present, the United States maintains a dominant position in advanced AI technologies and has previously imposed restrictions on sharing certain capabilities with other countries. For America’s allies, the central concern is the predictability of access to technologies upon which an increasing share of collective security may depend.

The report also highlights that cybersecurity chiefs from the Five Eyes intelligence alliance have warned that the rapid development of frontier AI models could render existing cyber risk assessments obsolete “in months, not years.” Their primary concern is the rapidly expanding AI capabilities becoming available to adversaries.

A similar uncertainty is reflected in assessments of the technological gap between American and Chinese AI models. The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) estimates that DeepSeek V4 Pro trails leading American frontier models by approximately eight months based on its benchmark evaluations. However, DeepSeek’s own published results, using different testing methods, suggest that its model is comparable to US systems released only about two months earlier.

Meanwhile, China is accelerating the integration of AI into military capabilities, including logistics, decision support systems, and autonomous technologies. Consequently, the West faces the challenge of preserving its technological advantage while simultaneously enabling governments and allied nations to translate that advantage into practical operational capabilities. The concern is that the time required to achieve this transformation may exceed the period during which that technological lead can be maintained.