CFR Surveyed 350 Experts About AI’s Future. Here Are the Takeaways.

Council on Foreign Relations | Jessica Brandt and Adam Segal

The Council on Foreign Relations surveyed 350 foreign policy experts on the future of artificial intelligence, revealing that over 80 percent expect highly fragmented global governance by 2035. With only 5 percent of respondents believing domestic regulatory bodies can keep pace with technological development, frontier AI laboratories are rapidly gaining unprecedented leverage over sovereign states.

This regulatory deficit is exacerbated by deep divisions over whether frontier capabilities will remain concentrated among a few advanced economies or diffuse widely through algorithmic breakthroughs. While a bilateral agreement between Washington and Beijing represents the most plausible path toward binding international rules, current geopolitical tensions make such cooperation highly unlikely. Consequently, 70 percent of those surveyed anticipate that a major technological accident will serve as the primary catalyst for governance reform, even as private developers increasingly capture state regulatory apparatuses and concentrate productivity gains within advanced economies.

Comment

The integration of private entities like OpenAI and Anthropic into the June 2026 G7 Summit reveals a fundamental shift where technological capability outpaces traditional state authority. This power asymmetry stems from the immense compute infrastructure and proprietary datasets controlled exclusively by these commercial laboratories. Consequently, sovereign states face a structural dependency on corporate actors for the development of critical national security algorithms and dual-use frontier models. This reliance compromises public oversight and complicates the enforcement of international non-proliferation standards for advanced software systems.

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