Key Takeaways
- AI geopolitics goes global: From the US Congress to the G7, from Bavaria to Bangkok, 2026 marks the moment when governments stop watching artificial intelligence and start legislating it.
- Whoever owns AI, owns the future: The Sanders proposal opens a radical debate on the ownership of language models, while companies like L'Oréal and Resonac accelerate industrial adoption.
AI is no longer just technology: it's a matter of power
It is June 2026 and the world of artificial intelligence has stopped being a topic for tech conferences. It has become a battleground — political, economic and cultural — on a planetary scale. In a single week, signals coming from Washington, Munich, Paris, Bangkok and the G7 summit draw a precise map: AI is redefining who leads, who produces and who — perhaps for the first time — might truly benefit from it.
Sanders vs. the giants: AI as a common good
The most disruptive move comes from the US Senate. Bernie Sanders has announced a bill that would require major artificial intelligence companies to transfer an equity stake (a percentage of ownership in a company) to American citizens. The idea is simple in its radicalism: if language models were trained on data produced by millions of people, then those people deserve an economic share of the profits generated. This is not progressive science fiction — it is a concrete response to the concentration of capital that defines the sector. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind: three entities worth trillions of dollars combined, built largely on public content and unpaid human labour. The Sanders proposal may not pass, but it has already changed the terms of the debate.
The G7 and the race for governance: who leads the Western alliance?
While Sanders stirs the domestic waters, the CEOs of Anthropic and Google DeepMind brought an explicit request to the G7 summit: a US-led alliance for AI development, with shared rules among Western democracies. The backdrop is the technological rivalry with China, a theme also raised by Hikmet Ersek — CEO of Resonac, a giant in semiconductor materials (hardware components essential for processors) — who warned: global demand for AI chips is explosive, but dependence on Asian supply chains represents a systemic risk (a risk that affects the entire economic system). The message is clear: the West must invest, coordinate and protect its own technological value chain before it is too late.
Europe moves: from Bavaria to German factories
In Europe, the response is more pragmatic and less ideological. In Bavaria, schools have been given the green light to formally assess students on their use of KI tools (Künstliche Intelligenz, the German term for artificial intelligence). This is not about tolerating "cheating with ChatGPT": it is a paradigm shift in education that recognises digital competence as a fully-fledged curricular subject. At the same time, German manufacturing companies are accelerating the adoption of AI in their production processes, with the stated goal of recovering competitiveness against Asian and American rivals. Germany, historically cautious about disruptive innovation (which radically breaks existing models), appears to have decided that the cost of waiting outweighs the risk of change.
AI in healthcare: the dark side of medical chatbots
Not everything shines, however. A study published in Italy tested the five most widely used AI-based chatbots in the world in a healthcare setting, with worrying results: a significant portion of the answers provided were inaccurate, misleading or potentially harmful to patients. The problem is far from marginal. In a context where millions of people already use these tools to self-diagnose or evaluate treatments, the reliability of language models (AI systems that generate text in natural language) becomes a matter of public health. This data should weigh heavily in the regulatory discussions at the G7 and in national parliaments: AI is not neutral, and its errors in certain contexts have real consequences.
From Southeast Asia to the beauty industry: AI everywhere
Two seemingly distant but telling signals round out the picture. Thailand has launched a national plan for AI adoption, focusing on competitiveness and economic development: a Southeast Asian country choosing not to remain a bystander in the technological revolution. And L'Oréal has signed a partnership with OpenAI to develop AI solutions in the beauty sector, from product personalisation to the shopping experience. Two developments that confirm the same trend: artificial intelligence is no longer the exclusive domain of Silicon Valley. It is global infrastructure, and those who fail to integrate it risk economic irrelevance. 2026 is the year the world stopped asking whether AI would change everything — and started deciding who would control that change.