Short Abstract

This roundtable explores how global governance shifted from early cooperative visions to today’s AI nationalism/Cold War. As scholars debate this transformation, we will generate images and scenarios in real time, turning the discussion itself into a live experiment in signaling and imagination.

Description

This roundtable explores the shifting foundations of global governance in the AI Cold War, where competition over computation, chips, and data replaces earlier models of collaboration and exchange. The paradox of this moment is that the more states strive to domesticate AI infrastructures and to secure supply chains, restrict access to critical minerals, and assert control over compute, the more they expose their dependence on globally entangled systems that no one actor fully commands. Sovereignty, once anchored in territory and possession, has become a performative act: it must be enacted through symbolic gestures, strategic restrictions, and infrastructural imaginaries that project control while revealing its absence. We call this emergent condition meta-sovereignty, a mode of rule sustained by infrastructures that are not yet realized, by fictions that persuade before they materialize, and by signals that substitute for the authority they cannot enforce. Drawing on insights from STS, political theory, and security studies, the roundtable invites participants to discuss how AI governance has shifted from multilateral coordination and open exchange toward a theatre of deterrence, secrecy, and signaling.

Questions for debate include: How is power performed when the materials of control (minerals, models, compute) are globally interdependent? What forms of imagination and display sustain claims to sovereignty in an era defined by scarcity and entanglement? And how do signals, rather than stable infrastructures, become the primary currency of legitimacy?

Throughout the 90-minute session, discussion among the scholars will be accompanied by a live generative visualization using the experimental system AIwars https://github.com/anonette/AIwars and generate scenarios at the end. As participants debate, the system will translate spoken exchanges into real-time images and scenarios, rendering the conversation itself as a form of signaling. The aim is to provoke a lively debate on how (meta)sovereignty is imagined, performed, and contested within the entangled infrastructures of the AI Cold War.