King Charles is heading to Washington this week to smooth over ruffled feathers in the transatlantic relationship. The pomp and pageantry serve a purpose: Donald Trump enjoys the company of royalty, and a few hours of flattery might thaw the chill that has settled between the White House and British leadership. But palace visits can only paper over so many fractures, and the current tensions run deeper than royal charm can reach.
Trump has made his displeasure with European leaders abundantly clear. He views their Middle Eastern policy as cowardice, and the war itself as evidence of his adversaries outmaneuvering him, though he has shown no inclination to admit his own role in the strategic disaster. Leaked Pentagon memos hinting that the US might oppose British claims to the Falkland Islands, combined with threats to tear up trade deals and impose new tariffs, reveal how transactional the White House has become. This is not alliance-building in any traditional sense. This is protection racket diplomacy, where sovereignty is the price of security.
Britain has grown accustomed to the weight of American power. But Trump's unpredictability, while genuinely unsettling, may be the lesser of two long-term perils. The real danger lies elsewhere, in a domain where US dominance is expanding at an alarming rate and where the stakes are far higher than any single political administration.
Science Minister Liz Kendall raised this alarm in a recent speech on AI and technological sovereignty. She framed artificial intelligence as the currency of geopolitical power in the coming decades, capable of purchasing economic advantages, scientific breakthroughs, and military superiority. The concern is stark: a handful of American companies control the digital infrastructure that nations increasingly depend on, and Britain risks sliding into dependency on systems it neither owns nor controls.
Kendall is pushing for cooperation among democratic middle powers, including Canada, Japan, South Korea, and European allies, to build a resilient digital ecosystem insulated from the oligopolistic grip of a few US tech firms. The vision echoes proposals from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney for an alliance of law-abiding democracies to counterbalance the expansionist ambitions of authoritarian giants. It is a sensible response to a real problem, but one that may be emerging too slowly.
The pace of AI development is accelerating in ways that should trouble anyone paying attention. Anthropic's latest Claude model, called Mythos, has proven so adept at finding flaws in computer code that the company restricted access to prevent it from becoming a cyber weapon in the wrong hands. The algorithm is efficient enough at hacking that independent observers have confirmed its prowess. This is not theoretical risk. These tools are becoming operational weapons.
The ideological character of those building these systems compounds the technical danger. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has been profiled as ruthlessly ambitious to the point of sociopathy. Alex Karp of Palantir, whose data systems are embedded in British military and NHS networks, published a manifesto rejecting pluralism in favor of US economic and cultural supremacy. Elon Musk, who controls both X and Starlink, has oscillated between bankrolling Ukraine's defense and promoting far-right propaganda. These are not thoughtful custodians of transformational power.
The concentration of control is the core issue. Anthropic at least appears to take safety seriously, having been blacklisted by the Trump administration for refusing to license its technology for autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. But good intentions are not a substitute for regulation or distributed power. Tech ethics are notoriously unreliable, and greed mixed with messianic conviction is a volatile combination.
Britain's vulnerability was exposed in conversations among officials who discussed scenarios in which Musk controls the flow of military intelligence during a European war. One described the prospect as terrifying. That assessment deserves to be taken seriously.
Building independent capability is theoretically possible but practically fraught. US companies remain essential sources of investment. Chinese alternatives are hardly more palatable. Brexit complicates the landscape further, caught between the pull of EU alignment and the seduction of regulatory autonomy. Data centers are energy hogs that leave environmental scars while creating few jobs. Backlash against them is already mounting in America.
The current euphoria around AI investment probably signals a bubble in formation, much like the dot-com mania of the 1990s. But bubbles bursting do not erase the underlying transformational force. The railways of the 19th century justified their boom-bust cycles because they genuinely rewired civilization. AI may do the same, which means countries that cede technological sovereignty now may find themselves permanently disadvantaged later.
Trump is erratic, vindictive, and motivated by simple hungers: money and status. Those limitations, paradoxically, bound his power. He operates within the old architecture of analogue authority, constrained by human frailties, personal vanity, and the physical limits of any single human lifespan. The tech architects building systems that could outlast, outthink, and ultimately outmaneuver any political leader answer to different masters entirely. Greed and utopian fervor drive them, not democratic accountability or national interest. If Britain ends up dependent on their infrastructure, the consequences will outlast any presidency.
Author James Rodriguez: "Trump is a transactional bully we can understand; the real threat is a handful of unaccountable companies with tools we cannot."
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