Techno-Feudalism at the UN: Corporate Capture and the Geopolitics of AI

The United Nations Security Council met on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2026 to discuss the implications of artificial intelligence on international peace and security. This meeting, chaired by the delegation of France, heard presentations from OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Hugging Face's Clement Delangue, and University of Montreal's Professor Yoshua Bengio. The Security Council also heard presentations from the usual cast of P5 and E10 member states.

It is not often that this august body is graced with the noble presence of some of our techno-feudal overlords. To be sure, it takes a special process through which the monthly president invokes Rule 39 of the Security Council's Provisional Rules of Procedure to hear the briefing of non-state actors in the capacity of "subject matter expert." Special rules for special people. All protocols observed. Diplomatic tomfoolery at its finest.

The aim of this critique is not to downplay the urgency of this meeting or the important work of the Security Council, but to highlight how the very multilateral system - on which international peace and security so heavily depends - can at times be exposed to corporate capture. The same revolving door of crony capitalism through which lobbyists write rules, shape opinions, and set agendas that favours a handful of wealthy elites in the Metropoles remains alive and well throughout our international political economy. In the hallowed halls of the United Nations, it is a well-oiled machine.

It is a strange crossroad at which we find ourselves. We are caught between paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and God-like technology to paraphrase the Harvard biologist Edward Wilson who described human development as woefully unbalanced. This is the crux of the matter. The world we inhabit concentrates prosperity and opportunity in too few hands, and to those less endowed it provides a disproportionate share of burdens. While in theory, artificial intelligence promises to unlock an age of abundance; the tribal instincts and inflated vanities of the human condition provide the greatest roadblock to meaningful collective action. So the planet burns, our global commons are depleted, and the wealth of nations desperately cries out for stewardship.

The rules-based international order appears to be at wit's end. And in its shadow lurks something even more sinister. A techno-feudal age that forgoes all diplomatic protocol and legal convention. A head of state kidnapped in the middle of the night. Unprovoked trade wars and indiscriminate bombing campaigns. An era of might is right abounds, and once the stage is set, the actors don't even pretend to take the moral high ground. While climate change and environmental degradation wreak havoc on the world’s most vulnerable communities, the AI buildout accelerates at a breakneck pace—promising an unprecedented concentration of wealth for the few, while the rest shoulder the systemic costs. Is this simply the classic rule of power: to the victor the spoils, while the weak suffer what they must?

It cannot be that in this 21st Century the dinner tables in one part of the world see feasts dominated by discussions of the next Trillion dollar IPO, while in another part of the world children go to bed hungry on a cold hard floor. This is not a resource challenge. It is a logistical bottleneck enforced by manmade systems and human decisions. So too are the bottlenecks of energy insecurity, inadequate access to water, and other global challenges created by gatekeepers that defend the profit imperative over the right of all humans to a life of dignity.

In the capital markets we have witnessed the "hyperscalers" aggressively binge on the pool of fixed-income credit to satisfy their infrastructure buildout. The unintended consequence of the industry's exuberance is an intensified competition that crowds out other issuers and pushes Treasury yields higher, driving up the cost of capital in the process. Under normal circumstances this isn't a bad problem to have, at least to the pension funds and insurance companies that structure products around these higher yields. But to the governments of small-island nations that face higher debt-servicing costs to fund healthcare and education, this challenge is an existential one. The point is that in a global economy that is as integrated and interdependent as ours, the trade-offs made in one part of the system can produce tragic results in others.

For the labour markets, there are many questions left to be answered. The elephant in the room is the social and economic fallout from agentic AI. When machines take the jobs that humans rely on, where does the value accrue? To the platform providers that see increased subscription revenues, these new productivity tools are a cash cow. But to the households that face loss of income due to inevitable layoffs and corporate restructuring, the agentic economy portends a dystopian nightmare. Communities that already struggle with high rates of unemployment and economic marginalization are ill-equipped to address the attendant risks of crime and insecurity that are likely to emerge. We must tread carefully as we enter this new age - an untamed wilderness where nothing is promised.

Security risks don't often emerge in a vacuum. They are usually triggered by inequalities of power, and stoked by clashes of identity across tribal lines of class, race, religion, or ideology. There are those that argue that in an agentic economy, power would inevitably be decentralized and access will be democratized. These are noble ambitions. History is littered with examples of less noble outcomes. From the discovery of fire to the invention of gunpowder, early adopters have always leveraged new technologies to assert power and control, often with disastrous consequences for innocent bystanders in each proverbial war of attrition. Hiroshima and Nagasaki serve as stark reminders of this primal tendency. Let us not mortgage humanity's future just to win the AI arms race.

The key message that this author wants to impart is not a rallying call to those Luddites who would rather sacrifice progress on the altar of anti-technology activism. This is an appeal to the builders, coders, and engineers to remain responsible and responsive to the needs of the human end users that will ultimately work with the technology tools they create. Companies that ship AI products ought to maintain some duty of care for the harms created through the use and misuse of their models. Autonomous systems must also be rigorously tested and their scope clearly defined in a manner that enhances existing legal conventions regarding human rights, international humanitarian law, and the norms and principles enshrined in the UN Charter. This means that the democratic franchise of all persons should be protected, and access to platforms should be made as inclusive and pluralistic as is reasonable and practical.

Intelligent design principles must guide the development of intelligent systems. All AI models should be ring-fenced from use in the development or deployment of any chemical, biological, radioactive, or nuclear agents and weapons. Likewise, critical infrastructure such as energy grids, public utilities, hospital networks, food supply chains, and transportation systems etc. should be safeguarded from the risks associated with autonomous tools. In theory, these should not be difficult problems to solve through cryptographic authentication standards; but not all countries and peoples are equally prepared from a standpoint of technical knowledge and resources. As a result, the international community must recommit towards deeper and more meaningful cooperation, rather than a competitive race to the bottom. Public education, radical transparency, technology transfer, and an earnest attempt to promote and defend the cause of freedom are all urgently required. To this end, the most impactful technology tools should be open-sourced with stringent safety standards to give all countries and peoples a real chance at security and development.

The multilateral order as we know it is under significant strain. Technological advancements promise to usher in a new age for humanity with great leaps forward expected in healthcare, education, labour productivity, and trade. But despite this potential for a genuine upliftment of the human condition, we stand at a critical juncture. Wars rage on across the Middle East and in Ukraine threatening the very fabric of human civilization. Transnational challenges ranging from the climate catastrophe to organized crime and terrorism demand collective action and unity of purpose to deliver justice for all. We must each acknowledge that inequalities exist and we must confront these issues with empathy and solidarity. Let us build bridges across the digital divide.

Scribe - 2026/09/23