Beyond the AI Race: HKU Scholars Put Ethics at the Centre of Geopolitics

When governments compete for advanced chips, frontier AI models and control over the rules that govern them, the argument is often framed as a race. A new book by two HKU scholars, Professor Boris Babic and Professor Brian Wong, asks a harder question: who bears the consequences when artificial intelligence reshapes borders, security, public decision-making and access to opportunity?

“Understanding the geopolitics of AI requires contending with ethical analysis. Understanding AI ethics would be impossible in a vacuum without geopolitical cognisance”, Professor Wong wrote in announcing the book with his co-author, Professor Babic.

That proposition sits at the heart of "The Geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence", a new open-access volume in Cambridge University Press & Assessment’s Elements in Philosophy and AI series. The book argues that AI should not be understood only as a technical safety issue or a domestic policy tool. When algorithms and AI infrastructure enter foreign policy, military affairs, migration systems and global supply chains, they create distinct ethical risks as well as opportunities.

Professor Babic, HKU-100 Associate Professor of Data Science, Law and Philosophy, and Professor Wong, HKU-100 Assistant Professor in Philosophy, bring together political philosophy, AI ethics, international relations and rational-choice theory. Their central intervention is what they call “macro-AI ethics”: an approach that treats states, corporations, international organisations and global publics—not only individual users—as morally relevant actors.

That shift matters, the authors argue, because conventional AI ethics has tended to focus on harms to individuals and groups, including privacy, bias and fairness. International-relations analysis, meanwhile, often centres on great-power competition and state self-interest. Neither approach alone, they contend, adequately addresses how AI may affect conflict escalation, foreign-policy decisions, military uses, misinformation, migration justice or the uneven distribution of its benefits.

The book also revisits the question of responsibility. Where an AI-enabled harm results from the clear, intentional action of a particular actor, conventional liability may apply. But geopolitical harms are often diffuse: they can be produced through a web of decisions by governments, companies, investors, developers and institutions. Drawing on political theorist Iris Marion Young’s Social Connection Model, the authors argue that those who help reproduce harmful structures can carry forward-looking responsibilities to prevent, repair or mitigate the damage—even where no single actor is straightforwardly to blame.

For the same reason, they say, global AI justice cannot be reduced to distributing access to computing power, models, data or chips. Their account of “global AI relational egalitarianism” asks whether people and states can relate to one another as equals in developing, governing, regulating and using AI. The concern is not simply who receives a resource, but whether global AI systems reproduce domination, exclusion, status hierarchies and disrespect.

The authors also challenge the assumption that every state must win a zero-sum AI race by denying rivals access to technology and infrastructure. Using the game-theory model known as the Stag Hunt, they argue that co-operation can produce better outcomes for all, provided countries can build trust, credible institutions and effective means of resolving disputes. This does not dismiss the reality of competition or security concerns. It asks whether isolationist strategies may deepen the very risks that governments say they want to manage.

For readers following the fast-moving debate over AI governance, the book offers a philosophical vocabulary for looking beyond the race metaphor. It asks not only who develops the most powerful systems, but who has a voice in shaping them, who is exposed to their harms and what obligations follow when technology becomes part of geopolitical power.

"The Geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence" can be accessed here.