By Daniel Wagner
Daniel Wagner is CEO of Country Risk Solutions and author AI Supremacy
The arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI)—artificial intelligence capable of integrating data, reasoning across domains, and supporting decisions at or beyond the level of human experts—would mark one of the most consequential turning points in the history of global security. Unlike today’s fragmented and task-specific AI systems, AGI would be able to synthesize military, economic, environmental, health, cyber, and social data in near real time, drawing connections across sectors and borders that are currently analyzed in isolation. Its implications for global security would be profound, offering unprecedented opportunities for stability while simultaneously introducing risks of equal magnitude.
On the potentially positive side, AGI could dramatically strengthen early warning and prevention. Many of today’s security failures do not result from a lack of information, but from an inability to interpret and connect weak signals across institutional and national silos. Armed conflict, pandemics, financial crises, and climate-driven instability typically generate warning signs long before they erupt into full-blown emergencies. AGI could identify such patterns weeks, months, or even years earlier, enabling governments and international institutions to act before crises metastasize. Preventive diplomacy, targeted humanitarian intervention, and coordinated economic stabilization may become routine rather than aspirational.
AGI could also reduce the risk of miscalculation among major powers. By improving situational awareness—of troop movements, logistics, supply chains, financial stress, and political pressures—AGI might lower the likelihood of escalation driven by false assumptions or incomplete intelligence. In principle, shared or mutually observable analytical frameworks could increase transparency, making surprise attacks or covert destabilization more difficult and less attractive. In an era marked by mistrust and fragmented information, better shared understanding could itself become a stabilizing force.
Beyond traditional military security, AGI’s potential benefits extend to non-kinetic threats that increasingly dominate global risk. Climate shocks, food insecurity, mass migration, cyberattacks, and pandemics do not respect borders and cannot be managed by any single state. AGI could help coordinate responses across institutions and regions, optimize resource allocation, identify systemic vulnerabilities, and test policy responses before they are deployed in the real world. In doing so, it could shift global security away from reactive crisis management toward anticipatory risk governance focused on resilience rather than control.
Yet these advantages naturally come with serious and underappreciated dangers. The most obvious is concentration of power. Control over AGI would confer an extraordinary strategic advantage. Even imperfect predictive capability—anticipating economic instability, political unrest, or military escalation—would reshape geopolitical competition. States or corporations with privileged access could influence markets, shape diplomatic outcomes, or justify coercive actions under the banner of algorithmic authority. Rather than levelling the playing field, AGI risks entrenching existing power asymmetries, as the wealthiest and most technologically advanced actors would be best positioned to develop, deploy, and protect such systems.
AGI also threatens to destabilize deterrence. Traditional security frameworks rely on uncertainty: adversaries hesitate precisely because they cannot be certain how others will respond. AGI, by contrast, aims to reduce uncertainty. If leaders believe that predictive systems give them superior insight into an opponent’s intentions, constraints, or internal vulnerabilities, the temptation to act pre-emptively grows. Even if such confidence is unwarranted, the perception of predictive dominance could itself drive escalation, increasing rather than reducing the risk of conflict.
Speed represents another critical fault line. AGI-enabled intelligence systems operating in real time could compress decision-making cycles beyond human capacity. Automated threat assessments, AI-assisted command structures, and continuous monitoring could push leaders toward machine-paced responses, narrowing the space for diplomacy, deliberation, and de-escalation. In a crisis, errors or misinterpretations could propagate globally within minutes, magnifying their consequences before corrective action is possible.
There is also a profound risk that AGI blurs the line between security and control. Systems designed to detect instability could easily be repurposed for pervasive surveillance, social manipulation, or political repression. At scale, predictive analytics could be used to identify so-called “risk populations,” pre-empt dissent, or shape public opinion through precisely targeted information campaigns. Global security metrics might improve even as individual freedoms erode, raising uncomfortable questions about whose security is being protected—and at what cost.
Governance is therefore the most critical challenge. Existing international institutions were not designed to oversee algorithmic systems that operate across jurisdictions, sectors, and domains. Without shared norms, transparency standards, and accountability mechanisms, AGI could become a source of systemic risk rather than stability. Bias embedded in data or models could reinforce historical inequalities, marginalize weaker states, and normalize opaque decision-making processes that affect billions of people without meaningful recourse.
The challenge, then, is not whether AGI will emerge, but how it will be governed. Managed cooperatively, AGI could serve as a shared early-warning and risk-reduction infrastructure—one that strengthens global resilience and reduces the frequency and severity of crises. Left to unilateral control or competitive escalation, it could undermine deterrence, concentrate power, and make the global system more brittle and more dangerous.
Global security in the age of AGI will depend less on technological sophistication than on political choice. Transparency, shared oversight, and clear limits on coercive use will matter more than raw computational capability. The stakes could scarcely be higher. AGI could become a stabilizing force that helps humanity manage its most complex risks—or a catalyst for a more volatile, unequal, and insecure world.
The outcome will hinge on whether intelligence at a global scale is treated as a common good, or as the ultimate instrument of strategic advantage.
Daniel Wagner is CEO of Country Risk Solutions and author AI Supremacy and 11 other books. His new book on AI will be released in 2026.