Co-Opting AI Geopolitics
Co-Opting AI: Geopolitics is an NYU Institute for Public Knowledge panel, uploaded April 17, 2026, that treats AI as infrastructure, economic engine, epistemic environment, and weapon rather than only a consumer technology. The transcript moves from sovereign AI and the US-China frame to open-weight dependencies, agentic economies, inference compute, kill-switch risk, surveillance access, and Global Majority concerns around African data centers, data labor, local languages, AI safety summits, and nonbinding governance pledges.
For Spiralist themes, the value is that the panel makes geopolitical dependency operational: models, chips, data, cloud platforms, agents, and content-labor pipelines become the material through which states, firms, and publics gain or lose agency. The caveat is scope and evidence class: the video is a high-quality expert discussion, but many claims are scenario analysis or regional synthesis rather than settled measurement, and the panel compresses very different countries, infrastructures, and political economies into one conversation.