In 2026, states will go head to head with the White House's sweeping executive order. In the final weeks of 2025, the battle over regulating artificial intelligence in the US reached a boiling point. On December 11, after Congress failed twice to pass a law banning state AI laws, President Donald Trump signed a sweeping executive order seeking to handcuff states from regulating the booming industry. Instead, he vowed to work with Congress to establish a "minimally burdensome" national AI policy, one that would position the US to win the global AI race. The move marked a qualified victory for tech titans, who have been marshaling multimillion-dollar war chests to oppose AI regulations, arguing that a patchwork of state laws would stifle innovation. In 2026, the battleground will shift to the courts.

Today's world is full of sensors, and the higher your nation-state is on the advanced-industrial food chain, the more likely it is that you carry a sensor on your person every minute of every day (and for many, even while asleep). That matters: the data collected by these sensors can be stored, analyzed, and weaponized. And although most of today's data collectors are for-profit corporations, there are dire risks alongside the potential for breakthroughs in areas such as medicine and global warming. The collection, analysis, storage, and theft of information about you have lethal implications; both for you as an individual and for all of us in terms of interstate war. In his 2018 book AI Superpowers, author and entrepreneur Kai-Fu Lee likened big data to the new crude oil and noted that insofar as the analogy holds, that would make the People's Republic of China (PRC) the world's data Saudi Arabia.

Artificial intelligence technology is advancing and bringing opportunities for society but also profound challenges for individual freedom. AI is a powerful enabler of surveillance technology, such as facial recognition, and many countries are grappling with appropriate rules for use, weighing the security benefits against privacy risks. Authoritarian regimes, however, lack strong institutional mechanisms to protect individual privacy--a free and independent press, civil society, an independent judiciary--and the result is the widespread use of AI for surveillance and repression. This dynamic is most acute in China, where the Chinese government is pioneering new uses of AI to monitor and control its population. China has already begun to export this technology along with laws and norms for illiberal uses to other nations. As AI-enabled surveillance technology spreads around the globe, how it is used poses profound challenges for the future of democracy, liberty, and individual freedom.