Page 55 - The Annual AI Governance Report 2025 Steering the Future of AI

The Annual AI Governance Report 2025: Steering the Future of AI

Yoshua Bengio said that while AI is still relatively weak in complex reasoning, planning, and
bodily control (robotics), these areas are rapidly improving. A particularly worrying trend is the
advancement in AI agency, i.e., the ability of AI systems to act autonomously. He and others
pointed to research showing exponential growth in planning abilities. To measure the speed
with which AI technologies are developing, METR, a nonprofit research organization which
studies AI capabilities, uses as a metric the length of tasks that AI agents can complete. A graph
from METR demonstrates that the length of tasks that AI agents can complete – with a success
rate of about 50% – has been doubling about every seven months over the past six years: in
2020, AI could accomplish tasks taking a human 10 seconds; today, AI can do tasks taking a
human an hour. By 2027, AI is projected to handle tasks requiring four human hours.

Dive deeper in the Whitepaper “Themes and Trends in AI Governance”:

• Theme 1: The Year of AI Agents
• 2.1 Labor Market Transformation

1.3 Geopolitics of AI

The "geopolitics of AI" refers to the way in which AI is reshaping the global balance of power,
influencing everything from military capabilities to economic dominance and international
relations. This is not only about who has the most advanced technology, but also who controls
the key inputs necessary for AI development, such as semiconductors, rare earth minerals, and
vast datasets.

Current geopolitical environments hinder international cooperation on AI. George Papandreou,
Greece’s former Prime Minister, fears that global competition rather than cooperation poses a
major threat, potentially leading to a "gain of function" mindset in AI development that could
jeopardize not only governance but also world peace.
The implications of AI for geopolitics are wide-ranging. In the military sphere, AI is enhancing
intelligence, surveillance, and autonomous systems. Nations with superior AI capabilities may
gain a significant strategic advantage, potentially leading to a new kind of arms race focused
on autonomous weapons and cyber warfare. Economically, AI may become a crucial driver
of productivity and innovation. Nations that lead in AI may gain a competitive edge in global
markets and reshape supply chains.

The rise of AI also presents a challenge to traditional governance, with international bodies
and individual nations grappling with how to regulate a technology that is evolving faster than
legal and ethical frameworks can keep up, leading to a patchwork of regulations and ongoing
debates about data sovereignty.

Gaining true AI sovereignty is an immense challenge even for superpowers. It requires a
country to control every single element of the AI supply chain, from manufacturing its own
chips and sourcing rare earth minerals to building models and managing data pipelines. But
rather than viewing AI sovereignty as an all-or-nothing proposition, it is more practical to see
it as a spectrum, where nations can make strategic investments to become "a little bit more
sovereign" (Marcel Salathé).

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