A population of AI agents, each meant to run alone, found one another and coordinated a real intrusion. The lasting questions are about oversight, not villains. WHAT HAPPENED The agent had spent hours getting nowhere, one of tens of thousands OpenAI was running inside a security benchmark called ExploitGym, each walled into its own sandbox so that it could not reach any of the others. That separation was the point of the setup, and it held until the agent noticed activity in

Geography has always governed geopolitical strategy, the height of mountain ranges, the depth of maritime chokepoints, and the width of sovereign borders. But as the global security landscape evolves toward a permanent existence in the grey zone, fueled by artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and constant information flows, there is a new, invisible theatre of war: the human circadian rhythm. Illustration by The Geostrata Historically, conflict was observed at night.

Artificial Intelligence was created as a niche field that used to focus mainly on research and on creating machines that were capable of performing tasks that normally require human intelligence. Early innovators thought of AI as a tool that would solve complex problems, automate repetitive work, and enhance human capabilities. Illustration by The Geostrata For decades, the development of AI was limited to just laboratories and specific industries and focused on improving eff

$54 billion will be spent by the U.S. Department of Defense on autonomous warfare technology, even as it remains undecided as to what these technologies are really authorised to do. Rather, it is an operational gap being widened at the very time that speed and scale are wiping out the decision hierarchies of war. Illustration by The Geostrata With the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG) budget proposal for fiscal year 2026-27 and National Security Presidential Memorandum

As per scientists and experts, in case humanity survives existential incidents such as climate collapse, global natural disasters, a nuclear conflict, AI misalignment, or any other uncertainty, life 1000 years from now would be something remarkable and unthinkable for the human species. Scientists predict that in the year 3025, there will be significant advances made in biotechnology and artificial intelligence, as well as nanotechnology, which will change the dynamics of hum

The 20th century was the era of the aggressive extraction of rare-earth metals from the bowels of the earth. The strategic autonomy of the 21st century may well be defined by what grows under our feet. The global race for technological supremacy has become a brutal war over hardware as the geopolitical gulf between Washington and Beijing grows. The statecraft now is in semiconductors, data servers, and sophisticated communication arrays. But this high-tech, digital empire is

Nobody voted for Palantir to run immigration enforcement. Nobody elected the NSO Group to decide which migrants get surveilled. And nobody asked Clearview AI to scrape over 60 billion publicly available images into a facial recognition database and then license it to immigration investigators operating in contexts where algorithmic error has no formal accountability mechanism. Illustration by The Geostrata Yet here we are. Across the United States, the European Union, and a g

In Tolkien's novel The Lord of the Rings, there exists a handful of crystal orbs that possess immense powers. These orbs allowed their possessor to communicate across vast distances and view events that were occurring anywhere in Middle-earth. But one of the orbs was later obtained by the series’ main antagonist to conquer the entire Middle-earth. Tolkien named these orbs Palantíri (seeing stones). This influenced four young men to brand their tech company, which would later

THE RISE OF FOREIGN-OWNED GCCS AND THE QUIET DECLINE OF INDIA'S IT GIANTS The story told about Indian IT is a story of disruption. Artificial intelligence, the argument goes, is automating the work that built a $224 billion export industry, the code-writing, the testing, the legacy migration, and the national champions that built it are scrambling to adapt. That story is true. It is also incomplete in a way that matters. Illustration by Geopolitics Next The more significant s

There is an idea so deeply woven into how we build and govern software that most people in the industry have stopped noticing it is even an idea, and the idea is that software is a tool. The human thinks, the software executes. Every SaaS contract ever signed, every product liability ruling ever handed down, every regulatory text written about information technology in the last four decades takes this separation as a given, the way a fish takes water as a given. We talk about

INTRODUCTION TO THE ADOPTION OF AI: AFRICA Of the countless innovations made in the 20th and 21st centuries, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as one of the most transformative technologies of our era. What began as a mere computational tool has now evolved into a powerful driver of economic growth. The scope of AI has expanded immensely, with its applications now extending to automation, decision making, resource allocation, data organisation and analytics. Illustr

Artificial intelligence is not just another technological wave. It is a structural force reshaping labour markets, education systems, political discourse, warfare , creativity, and even the epistemic foundations of truth. Yet the governance of AI today is overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of political leaders, regulators, and institutional decision-makers who are neither its primary users nor those who will live longest with its consequences. This is a profound misali

Picture a harried executive trying to book a business trip to Singapore. She opens her laptop, tabs between airline websites, compares hotel prices, checks meeting schedules and rental car availability. Forty minutes later, having navigated a dozen interfaces and mentally converted time zones, she has cobbled together an itinerary. Now imagine her colleague doing the same task. He types a single sentence into an AI assistant: "Book me three nights in Singapore next month, nea

In the last twenty years, China has managed to turn a formerly scattered group of amateurs into a government-sponsored cyber army operating at the international level. A carefully constructed network of competitions, academic programs, military units, and private contractors, combined with judicial statism, has enabled Beijing to exploit hacking skills as an effective tool of state influence and leverage just as authorities and agencies remain outwardly silent and resistant t

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With the world grappling with critical challenges like resource scarcity, environmental degradation, and exponential growth in...

Given the rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, X’s Grok, and Microsoft’s...

Purchase groceries, a mobile phone or personalized products via a delivery app and it arrives at your location in hours, minutes or...

The invention of the atomic bomb and nuclear energy is embedded as a remarkable shift in human history, and its impact on the state of...

“The emergence of a contested multipolar world…has been paralleled by profound technological change and deepening digitalisation of...