Whose AI Order? AI Adoption in a Fragmented World

Artificial intelligence is spreading just as geopolitical competition intensifies, yet most accounts of how the world adapts to AI pay little attention to how that competition sets the terms of adoption. Export controls, splintering governance standards, the divide between open-weight and closed frontier models., and uneven access to compute and cloud infrastructure increasingly determine which AI systems countries can use, on what terms, and how dependent they remain on others’ rules and platforms. This panel launches the Pardee Center’s AI Governance & Data Initiative. Bringing together experts from academia, policy, and industry, it treats geopolitical competition and societal adaptation as one conversation rather than two, asking how rivalry among frontier powers shapes the choices available to everyone else. The discussion is organized around the initiative’s three research pillars: the future governance landscape, infrastructure, data, and leverage, and the societies on the receiving end of AI.