Empires of AI: The Rise and Fall of a New Global Order

Foreign Affairs · Niall Ferguson, Lisa Klaassen, and Eric Schmidt · 2026-10-20 04:00 UTC

In this essay, Niall Ferguson, one of the world’s foremost experts on imperial history, teams up the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, and the researcher Lisa Klaassen to make the provocative argument that AI is an inherently “imperial technology”—and to reveal what the fate of past empires might say about the future of U.S.-Chinese competition in a world shaped by AI.

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