# Empires of AI

- Source: Foreign Affairs
- Published: 2026-10-20T04:00:00+00:00
- Category: World
- Original: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/empires-artificial-intelligence-ferguson-klaassen-schmidt
- Canonical: https://groundlevelnews.com/story/empires-of-ai-8d3c26/

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 Klaasen 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.

_Ground Level News shows a short summary only; the full article and all rights belong to Foreign Affairs._