World Without Order and the Machine that Runs It

Rachel Adams (Prof.), CEO and Founder: Global Center on AI Governance, February 2026.

A “world without rules” was the resounding refrain from Davos, 2026. But one of the most powerful forces shaping the world - artificial intelligence (AI) - has long operated as if rules were optional. When Canada’s Mark Carney and France’s Emmanuel Macron spoke of a crumbling international order, they were also, whether explicitly or not, describing the political conditions in which today’s AI industry has boomed, and which may now be turning against it.

AI Was Raised Above the Law

Long before political leaders openly questioned the viability of the international rules-based order, AI - and the digital platforms that preceded it - were already operating in a world without rules. From social media to cloud computing, dominant technology firms grew under a global regulatory model that was permissive by design. Competition law lagged, enabling market concentration. Labour protections were evaded through classification games. Content moderation was privately governed despite profound public consequences. Data crossed borders with impunity. Where harms emerged, the response was voluntary principles and self-regulation.

When AI was layered onto these systems, all of this intensified. As journalists and researchers have documented, large-scale models rely on vast, opaque, and energy-intensive data pipelines that funnel data around the world. They depend on global labour markets for annotation and moderation, where workers are often classified as contractors without protections or benefits. National regulators have struggled to keep pace, and international institutions remain under-empowered to govern issues that are both enormous in scale and deeply interconnected. In this sense, AI - and the largely US-based companies that produce it - have always operated in the grey zones of the international order.

The Profitability of a World Without Rules

A world without rules is highly profitable for some actors. The AI industry, particularly its most powerful firms, benefits from regulatory fragmentation and jurisdictional arbitrage. Where there is no shared baseline for safety, labour standards, data governance, or accountability, companies can train models in jurisdictions with weak data protection, site energy-intensive data centres where oversight is light, and outsource the most harmful labour to countries with the fewest protections. At the same time, powerful firms position themselves to lobby governments by invoking national competitiveness against regulation.

In a fractured global order, power accrues to those who can operate internationally without being meaningfully governed. This is a structural feature of the political economy of AI, and the means through which today’s AI empires were built. But it is also deeply unsustainable.

AI is increasingly entangled with national security and economic sovereignty. Governments rely on it to manage borders, strengthen policing, administer welfare, and deliver public services. Yet the infrastructure underpinning these functions is privately owned, globally distributed, and beyond the full control of the states that deploy it or the citizens affected by it. This paradox cannot endure, particularly in an international order without clear rules.

What Comes Next?

In Davos, Carney spoke of the opportunity for a new world order and called on the world’s middle powers to come together. We now have the opportunity, as the façade of a rules-based liberal order recedes, to reimagine AI governance as part of a broader project of global political repair, centred on political responsibility and moral accountability.

This requires centring Southern perspectives and priorities; addressing the market dominance of the AI industry; re-establishing AI as public-interest infrastructure with clear guidelines for legitimate use and public ownership; and embedding governance across the full AI value chain, including its environmental costs. These ambitions demand forms of cooperation, institutional capacity, and market restraint that feel largely absent today. Yet they are essential if we are to avoid futures that place the hard-won gains of equality, freedom, and justice at risk.

In summary, a world without order advantages those who can operate without accountability, leaving everyone else exposed to decisions they did not author and cannot contest. As governments increasingly adopt AI to perform core public functions - undergirded by private interests in a world where rules are optional - political responsibility risks being abdicated to a technology that remains globally ungoverned. Developing global rules and standards for AI is therefore not peripheral, but fundamental, to rebuilding a more just and equal world order.

This blog is based on a longer article: read the full post on Rachel Adams' Substack.