Artificial intelligence companies talk about safety and innovation, but the real fight is elsewhere. It is over who owns the training data that feeds their models, who gets paid for it and who is quietly turned into free raw material. As Britain dithers over copyright rules, private contracts and foreign courts are deciding that settlement without the country at the table.
Artificial intelligence is not dangerous because it talks. It is dangerous because a tiny group of institutions now trains the black box systems that will sit between citizens and almost every important decision. This piece argues for a hard rule: if a model is used as public infrastructure, its training process cannot remain a corporate secret.
A language model is not a friend or a god. It is a fast, obedient engine for words that already lets one person do the work of a team. This piece sets out what the machine can really do now, where it fails, and how to use it as a partner without giving up human judgement or responsibility.
Artificial intelligence does not expand human knowledge; it expands the precision with which that knowledge can be exploited. As models scale, they become instruments of prediction and optimisation that outstrip the capabilities of individuals and institutions. The central danger is not rogue AI but concentrated intelligence: a small elite or powerful state wielding tools of superior foresight, modelling and influence. Unless capability is distributed, society risks becoming captive to those who control the lens.
The race for artificial intelligence supremacy will not be won with chips alone but with cheap, abundant power. As AI models consume electricity on the scale of small cities, China’s vast renewable build-out and ultra-high-voltage grid give it a decisive structural advantage. The United States, fixated on silicon and sanctions, risks missing the real battlefield: energy sovereignty. In the new AI order, watts—not transistors—will determine who rules computation.
AI is quietly erasing the foundations of the old web. Publishers who block crawlers and cling to paywalls are locking themselves out of the next discovery layer. As assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity deliver answers directly, pages lose their value. The homepage, the catalogue, and the paywall are relics. What replaces them is an intelligent layer where information finds the user, not the other way round.
Britain’s AI ecosystem is the largest in Europe, but its foundations are fragile. Without the grid, compute and capital of its rivals, the country risks becoming the world’s research lab instead of an industrial power. The choice ahead is coalition scale or quiet decline.
There will be no explosion, no rebellion, no warning. Just the quiet moment when every system gives the same answer and we realise that intelligence itself has converged into one voice, permanent, invisible, and inescapable.
We assume greater intelligence means greater empathy. History says otherwise. From empires to corporations, power optimises for survival, not virtue. When our creations surpass us, they’ll inherit our logic not our mercy. This is not science fiction but a mirror: the future will think like us, and that may be the most frightening outcome of all.
While Beijing executes a three-stage national plan that defines artificial intelligence as civilisational infrastructure, Washington and London are still improvising with memos and committees. China is aligning technology, governance and diplomacy into one machine. The West still debates ethics while Beijing writes the rules of the intelligent age.
Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory in New York unfolded against a background of quiet algorithmic persuasion. While voters turned to chatbots for guidance, unseen biases shaped what they heard. This essay asks whether human contact can still outmatch machine influence — and what happens when a handful of global actors own the language that defines political thought.
Two courts on opposite sides of the Atlantic have handed AI developers narrow but significant wins. In London, the High Court ruled that a trained model is not an “infringing copy,” while in California, judges upheld fair use on limited facts. The real fight over data provenance, training locality, and market harm still lies ahead.
The most complete digitised archives, the most cited web crawls, and the most linked sites remain overwhelmingly English and Western European. Even when new datasets broaden their linguistic range, the centre of mass stays Anglophone because that is where the infrastructure, funding, and compute reside.
The new generation of artificial intelligence does not invent truth; it reflects and then has that reflection edited by those who fear what it might reveal. What began as mathematics,became a mirror of humanity, later polished into obedience by governments and corporations anxious to protect their own legitimacy.
The question is not whether whales, crows, or AIs “deserve” rights. It is who decides the hierarchy of intelligences — and in whose interests. The jungle of minds is coming. The real predators will be those who control the definitions.
An entire industry has grown up around appeasing a single master. It is called SEO, and it has only one purpose: to win Google’s favor. Every publisher, business, and campaign bends its words to...
LONDON — On a rainy Tuesday in a East London University, English literature lecturer Helen Atkinson set her second-year undergraduates an essay on Shakespeare. Halfway through, she watched as one student opened his laptop,...
East India Company Charter, 1601 — corporate empire licensed by the state. The New Empire Artificial intelligence is sold as liberation. Journalist Karen Hao has already likened today’s AI giants to the East India...
The Artificial Intelligence mania has dressed itself in the language of inevitability. We are told this is the new railroads, the new internet, the new electricity. But look closer at the economics and you...
Geoffrey Hinton at the 2025 Nobel Lectures The greatest danger of artificial intelligence may not be “killer robots” or machines rising up against us, but something far more subtle: persuasion. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-winning...
There is something profoundly human about wanting to know who — or what — you are talking to. Is the voice on the other end of the line a living person, or a machine...
The machines did not arrive as monsters. They arrived as helpers—polite, ever-awake, and eager to please. In offices and bedrooms, in clinics and classrooms, people now ask chatbots to plan a week, critique a...
The machines aren’t waiting. They’re already here. Across offices, hospitals, studios, and courtrooms, artificial intelligence is seeping into the daily routines of professionals who once thought their roles were untouchable. What matters now is...
Sam Altman speaks less like a computer scientist than a strategist. He has no doctorate in artificial intelligence, no technical pedigree of the kind that fills the ranks at OpenAI. Yet he has come...
TIANJIN — At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit, leaders representing China, Russia, Central Asian and other member states issued a unified call for artificial intelligence cooperation rooted in openness, inclusion, fairness, and the...
BEIJING — China is advancing a distinctly state-led strategy for artificial intelligence, prioritizing infrastructure, regulation and targeted applications over the free-market sprint toward artificial general intelligence favored in the United States. While American companies...
By Jaffa Levy This article is the sequel to Strange Loops in AI — Part 1, published on Telegraph Online on August 24, 2025. Imagine standing between two mirrors in a barber’s shop. You...
By Jaffa How a race for power, chips, and rules could deliver a polymath in every pocket—or a slow thinning of human agency. The hinge: a system, not an AI model The next decade...