AI Governance

Abstract Artificial intelligence (AI) will be a transformative technology, with extreme potential risks and benefits. AI governance refers to the norms and institutions shaping how AI is built and deployed, as well as the policy and research efforts to make it go well. This chapter argues that the field of AI governance should have an expansive and ambitious scope, commensurate to the challenges, with robust internal collaboration given transferable lessons and shared policy opportunities. To make sense of the impacts of AI, the chapter offers three theoretical lenses, focusing on distinct mechanisms, impacts, and challenges. These lenses regard AI as a general purpose technology, an information technology, and an intelligence technology. The chapter then provides a lens on governance focusing on institutional fit and adaptation to the externalities produced by AI. Institutional adaptation will be especially difficult when a governance issue touches on deep social conflicts. Great power security competition poses a particular challenge because it can induce extreme—even existential—risks and is among the hardest dynamics to govern. Building strong competent global institutions to govern powerful AI would be a historically unparalleled challenge, but ultimately may be required to steer away from the greatest risks inherent to great power competition.