Data is becoming the nervous system of the modern state. AI can help democracies govern better and fight smarter, but it can also turn public service into surveillance, as Sham Banerji reports.
As governments and corporations gather unprecedented volumes of data, artificial intelligence is transforming information into a strategic source of political, economic and military power.
In the recent Vatican statement on the politics of AI, Pope Leo XIV argues that health, genetic and demographic data have become the new ‘rare earths’ of power. The pontiff warns that data is one of the central political resources of the AI age and should not be controlled by ‘a handful of actors’.
At the launch in May the only technologist on the Vatican’s panel of listed speakers was Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, who delivered an unusual confession from inside Big AI: ‘Every frontier AI lab, including Anthropic, operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing’. He added that what was needed were ‘moral voices that the incentives cannot bend’.
For nations, raw data is no longer the main prize. A live, cross-linked information system, connecting health records, tax files, welfare claims, immigration data, police logs, satellite images and commercial transactions is far more valuable. Once linked by AI software, such systems can give governments powerful, actionable intelligence. This makes citizen data infrastructure as strategic as roads and electricity grids. Its architects are the new contractors of state power.