DUBAI — The vast, global efforts to arrest rising temperatures are imperiled and must accelerate, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris told the world climate summit on Saturday.
“We must do more,” she implored an audience of world leaders at the COP28 climate talks in Dubai. And the headwinds are only growing, she warned.
“Continued progress will not be possible without a fight,” she told the gathering, which has drawn more than 100,000 people to this Gulf oil metropolis. “Around the world, there are those who seek to slow or stop our progress. Leaders who deny climate science, delay climate action and spread misinformation. Corporations that greenwash their climate inaction and lobby for billions of dollars in fossil fuel subsidies.”
Her remarks — less than a year before an election that could return Donald Trump to the White House — challenged leaders to cooperate and spend more to keep the goal of containing global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius within reach. So far, the planet has warmed about 1.3 degrees since preindustrial times.
“Our action collectively, or worse, our inaction will impact billions of people for decades to come,” Harris said.
The vice president, who frequently warns about climate change threats in speeches and interviews, is the highest-ranking face of the Biden White House at the Dubai negotiations.
She used her conference platform to push that image, announcing several new U.S. climate initiatives, including a record-setting $3 billion pledge for the so-called Green Climate Fund, which aims to help countries adapt to climate change and reduce emissions. The commitment echoes an identical pledge Barack Obama made in 2014 — of which only $1 billion was delivered. The U.S. Treasury Department later specified that the updated commitment was “subject to the availability of funds.”
Meanwhile, back in D.C., the Biden administration strategically timed the release of new rules to crack down on planet-warming methane emissions from the oil and gas sector — a significant milestone in its plan to prevent climate catastrophe.
The trip allows Harris to bolster her credentials on a policy issue critical to the young voters key to President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign — and potentially to a future Harris White House run.
“Given her knowledge base with the issue, her passion for the issue, it strikes me as a smart move for her to broaden that message out to the international audience,” said Roger Salazar, a California political strategist and former aide to then-Vice President Al Gore, a lifetime climate campaigner.
Yet sending Harris also presents political peril.
Biden has taken flak from critics for not attending the talks himself after representing the United States at the last two U.N. climate summits since taking office. And climate advocates have questioned the Biden administration’s embrace of the summit’s leader, Sultan al-Jaber, given he also runs the United Arab Emirates’ state-owned oil giant. John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, has argued the partnership can help bring fossil fuel megaliths to the table.
Harris has been on a climate policy roadshow in recent months, discussing the issue during a series of interviews at universities and other venues packed with young people and environmental advocates. The administration said it views Harris — a former California senator and attorney general — as an effective spokesperson on climate.
“The vice president’s leadership on climate goes back to when she was the district attorney of San Francisco, as she established one of the first environmental justice units in the nation,” a senior administration official told reporters on a call previewing her trip.
Joining Harris in Dubai are Kerry, White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi and John Podesta, who’s leading the White House effort to implement Biden’s signature climate law.
Biden officials are leaning on that climate law — dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act — to prove the U.S. is doing its part to slash global emissions. Yet climate activists remain skeptical, chiding Biden for separately approving a series of fossil fuel projects, including an oil drilling initiative in Alaska and an Appalachian natural gas pipeline.
Similarly, the Biden administration’s opening COP28 pledge of $17.5 million for a new international climate aid fund frustrated advocates for developing nations combating climate threats. The figure lagged well behind other allies, several of whom committed $100 million or more.
Nonetheless, Harris called for aggressive action in her speech, which was followed by a session with other officials on renewable energy. The vice president committed the U.S. to doubling its energy efficiency and tripling its renewable energy capacity by 2030, joining a growing list of countries. The U.S. also said Saturday it was joining a global alliance dedicated to divorcing the world from coal-based energy.
Like other world leaders, Harris also used her trip to conduct a whirlwind of diplomacy over the war between Israel and Hamas, which has flared back up after a brief truce.
U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Harris would be meeting with “regional leaders” to discuss “our desire to see this pause restored, our desire to see aid getting back in, our desire to see hostages get out.”
The war has intruded into the proceedings at the climate summit, with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas both skipping their scheduled speaking slots on Friday. Iran’s delegation also walked out of the summit, objecting to Israel’s presence.
Kirby said Harris will convey “that we believe the Palestinian people need a vote and a voice in their future, and then they need governance in Gaza that will look after their aspirations and their needs.”
Although Biden won’t be going to Dubai, the administration said these climate talks are “especially” vital, given countries will decide how to respond to a U.N. assessment that found the world’s climate efforts are falling short.
“This is why the president has made climate a keystone of his administration’s foreign policy agenda,” the senior administration official said.
Robin Bravender reported from Washington, D.C. Zia Weise and Charlie Cooper reported from Dubai.
Sara Schonhardt contributed reporting from Washington, D.C.
Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal and Stani Kulechov, founder of Aave, were among investors in a fundraise for Llama, a protocol aiming to provide easy-to-use tools for on-chain organizations.
Llama, an access control and governance platform for smart contracts, raised $6 million during a seed funding round led by Founders Fund and Electric Capital. The capital raise is earmarked for further development of Llama’s platform which co-founders Shreyas Hariharan and Austin Greene say would allow developers to focus on their core products.
Hariharan’s statement regarding the announcement noted that builders could leverage Llama to scale their on-chain entities by defining roles and permission for critical actions such as protocol upgrades, moving treasury funds, editing smart contract parameters and initiating emergency halts.
Greene added that Llama’s platform could reduce development costs and by extension, pave the way for more secure and trustworthy decentralized protocols with higher resistance to exploits.
Building and maintaining privileged access systems requires precious engineering resources and a large security budget. Teams just want a secure way to set and iterate on granular roles and permissions for all their decision-makers without writing custom modules.
Austin Greene, Llama co-founder
The Llama co-founders said their full-stack solution was born from countless hours of supporting blockchain builders and understanding the pain points associated with running smart contracts.
“We’ve contributed to leading protocols and used our learnings to build the product we wish we had,” said Hariharan.
Other Llama seed investors include Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, Aave founder Stani Kulechov, Stripe’s president of product and business Willy Gaybrick, Anchorage CEO Nathan McCauley, Coinbase protocol specialist Viktor Bunin, Zeitgeist founder Sina Habinian and entities such as Elad Gil, Amplify Partners, Reverie, and FJ Labs.
As reported by crypto.news, a number of crypto projects have raised funding from investors as 2023 draws to a close. 9GAG’s memecoin raised $11 million although the token notably does not have a roadmap. Moonveil also announced $5.4 in seed funding to bolster its web3 gaming studio and crypto payment provider Triple-A raised $10 million ahead of its token launch on Ethereum.
LONDON — London and Washington are to announce a “close collaboration” on AI safety as early as Wednesday, a U.K and U.S. official confirmed to POLITICO.
The collaboration is expected to marry new guardrails the White House placed on artificial intelligence development in this week’s executive order (EO) with existing work by the United Kingdom’s “Frontier AI Taskforce.”
“We plan to announce close bilateral collaboration with the U.S. safety institute this week,” a U.K. official close to the planning of Britain’s AI safety summit told POLITICO. The person was granted anonymity to talk about the summit, which will take place at Bletchley Park on Nov. 1 and 2.
Both countries will be announcing their own version of the institutes as the summit kicks off. In a speech Wednesday in London, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, who is representing the Biden administration at the summit, will announce the United States AI Safety Institute, which will be housed at the Department of Commerce, according to a U.S. official granted anonymity to discuss internal plans.
“It will work to create guidelines, standards and best practices for evaluating and mitigating the full spectrum of risks,” the U.S. official added. “We must address the full spectrum of risk, from potentially catastrophic risks to societal harms that are already happening such [as] bias, discrimination and the proliferation of misinformation.”
Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said he will set up an “AI Safety Institute” that will examine, evaluate and test new types of the emerging technology. Sunak said the new institute will build on the work of Britain’s existing Frontier AI Taskforce, which he said has already been granted “privileged access” to the technology models of leading AI companies like Google DeepMind, Anthropic and OpenAI.
The countries will “also participate in information sharing and research collaboration,” said the U.S. official, and will be making their own separate announcements. The U.S. will also share information with other similar safety institutes in other countries.
The White House executive order signed Monday will require that developers of the most powerful AI systems share their safety test results and other critical information with the U.S. government. It is designed to ensure AI systems are safe before companies make them public. Under the EO, Washington will set up an “AI Safety and Security Board.”
The U.K.’s Tech Secretary Michelle Donelan told POLITICO that it was easier for the U.S. to lead the industry to be more transparent because it is dominated by American firms | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
“We’re trying to lead with substance here and we’re trying to engage with other countries with substance and this is a vision, and the Vice President will lay it out in her speech, […] for how the United States is seeing AI policy and AI governance,” said the White House special adviser on AI, Ben Buchanan, on the forthcoming episode of the POLITICO Tech podcast on the timing of the EO coming in the same week as the U.K. AI summit. Harris is giving a speech in London on the administration’s AI initiatives, including the EO on Wednesday afternoon.
The U.K.’s Tech Secretary Michelle Donelan told POLITICO on Tuesday that it was easier for the U.S. to lead the industry to be more transparent because it is dominated by American firms, but there are aspects of the work that the U.K. can move faster on.
“I know America and other countries will have plans for institutes too, but we can do it a lot quicker, because we already have that initial organization in the [Frontier AI Taskforce],” she said. “We’ve already got that expertise setup, funding in there, and our processes allow us to do that at a quicker speed.”
“The future vision is to secure the safety of models before they are released,” Sunak said Thursday. Britain is expected to publish some information publicly, but will reserve more sensitive national security intel to a smaller group of like-minded governments.
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Vincent Manancourt, Eugene Daniels and Annabelle Dickson
BLETCHLEY PARK, England — The United States and China joined global leaders to sign a 27-country agreement on the risk of AI that launched a two-day AI Safety Summit.
In a major diplomatic coup for the British hosts, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo took the stage on Wednesday morning alongside Wu Zhaohui, China’s vice minister of science, at the summit at Bletchley Park — a former military installation north of London where British engineers used early forms of computers to break German codes during World War II.
The site — symbolic of what London believes is a similar global need to rein in the potential harms of artificial technology — forms the backdrop for efforts by politicians, tech executives and academics to find new ways to police a technology evolving faster than almost all governments can respond to it.
This week alone, the U.S. government and G7 group of leading Western democracies published separate efforts to regulate artificial intelligence in the form of a White House executive order and voluntary code of conduct, respectively. The EU expects to complete its separate Artificial Intelligence Act by early December and the United Nations’ newly-created AI advisory board will provide its own recommendations by the end of 2023.
“We will compete as nationals. But even as we compete vigorously, we must search for global solutions for global problems,” said Raimondo, who is traveling to the United Kingdom alongside U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. “The work, of course, does not begin and end with just the U.S. and the U.K. We want to expand information sharing, research, collaboration, and ultimately policy alignment across the globe.”
In a summit communiqué, published Wednesday, 27 countries and the EU signed the so-called Bletchley Park Declaration on AI. The document focuses solely on so-called “frontier AI,” or the latest version of the technology that has become popular via digital services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The signing countries include both China and the U.S. despite the world’s two largest economies battling over everything from technology to geopolitical power. The voluntary statement commits governments to work together toward trustworthy and responsible AI — catchwords for the safe use of the emerging technology.
“China is willing to engage on AI governance for the promotion of all mankind. That’s our objective,” Wu Zhaohui, China’s vice minister of science and technology, told the audience in Bletchley. The official sat on stage next to the U.S.’s Raimondo despite the countries’ ongoing tension.
References to global AI regulation efforts undertaken by international organizations such as the United Nations and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which were featured in an earlier draft, did not make it to the final communiqué. Questioned about that in a press briefing, U.K. Digital Minister Michelle Donelan said that the summit “complements and doesn’t cut across the existing processes” unfolding at the international level, and that officials from the U.N. and the OECD see the U.K.’s initiative as “as a missing piece of the [AI regulation] puzzle” as it specifically deals with advanced frontier AI.
The British government announced the next AI Safety Summit will be held in South Korea in May, 2024 and a third event is planned for France by the end of next year. The U.K. and the U.S. also announced plans to work together on AI Safety Institutes, which are expected to exchange analyses.
Věra Jourová, the EU’s digital chief, welcomed the renewed efforts to rein in potential risks associated with the most advanced systems of artificial intelligence. The 27-country bloc has been working on its own AI legislation for the last three years. But the Czech politician acknowledged much had changed over that time period when it came to what AI systems could now do.
“We have a common obligation for doing this right,” Jourová told the British audience Wednesday in reference to global efforts to set guardrails for the emerging technology. “The future will ask us if we did the right thing at the right moment.”
LONDON — British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has closed the world’s first AI Safety Summit by getting backing from Elon Musk.
In London’s Lancaster House, where the wifi was patchy, but the gold trim abundant, Musk sat down for a one-on-one interview with the British PM on Thursday evening.
The billionaire owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X described Rishi Sunak’s decision to invite China to the Bletchley Park summit as “essential.”
“Thank you for inviting them,” Musk said. “Having them here is essential. If they’re not participants, it’s pointless.”
Musk said AI had the potential to “create a future of abundance” and a “universal high income” if governments stepped in to act as referees.
“There will come a point where no job is needed,” Musk said. “You can have a job if you want to have a job… but the AI will be able to do everything. I don’t know if that makes people comfortable or uncomfortable,” provoking nervous laughter from Sunak.
Just under four hours earlier the prime minister had wrapped up the world’s first AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park with an international agreement which included monitoring large language models developed by the most advanced labs.
Musk, who has had several run-ins with governments over regulation, said the state had a role to play in AI governance to “safeguard the interests of the public”. “If you look at any sports game, there’s always a referee,” he added, in comments supportive of Sunak’s approach to AI governance.
The pair sat on a stage in a casual interview format, with Sunak jacketless and crossed legged, while Musk wore a black blazer over a T-shirt.
Musk told the audience, which included Cabinet ministers and tech execs, that San Francisco and Greater London are the “two leading locations on earth” for AI, adding the U.K. is “doing very well.”
Sunak had faced criticism for hosting Musk, whose platform, X, has been plagued by misinformation.
But he defended that decision in an interview with POLITICO’s Power Play podcast on Wednesday stating: “I think actually if you listen to what Elon Musk is saying, he’s someone who for a long time has been talking about the potential risk of AI and its existential risks.”
I recently graduated with my master’s degree and am seeking full-time employment at age 53. I want to know what is the best way to invest some of my earnings when I begin receiving a paycheck. I expect to have an annual salary of between $80,000 and $90,000.
For religious reasons, I cannot invest to earn interest, but business-related ventures such as stocks are acceptable. I am planning to set aside up to $1,000 per month for investment purposes, so that I can build some retirement funds. What are my options?
“You have already made the best investment you can make — one in yourself, your education and your future.”
MarketWatch illustration
Dear First-Time,
Congratulations on your master’s degree. You have already made the best investment you can make — one in yourself, your education and your future. It takes patience, guts and stamina to go back to college in your 50s, and you should be very proud. You were one of about 505,000 students in college ages 50 and over, representing less than 4% of the student population.
Given your faith, CDs and high-yield savings accounts are ruled out. A letter writer recently asked me where he should start looking to invest his $50,000 life savings, and I pointed him in the “make interest off your cash” direction, particularly given the recent rise in interest rates. That won’t work for you, but the good news is that you do have many options.
There are investment vehicles for you. In fact, the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions sets guidelines for investing in accordance with the Sharia religious code, including rules around companies that derive a percentage of their profits from tobacco and alcohol products. And, yes, it also regards interest as unjust and exploitative.
Saturna Capital has mutual funds that follow Islamic principles. The Amana Income Fund AMANX, which focuses on current income and the preservation of capital, has had an average annual five-year return of 8.8% for investor shares, slightly lower than the 9.9% average return for the S&P 500 SPX
over the same period with dividends reinvested. I suggest this as a guidepost rather than a recommendation.
Similarly, the Knights of Columbus assets are managed by Knights of Columbus Asset Advisors in accordance with Catholic moral principles, which are distilled to six main tenets: “protecting human life, promoting human dignity, reducing arms production, pursuing economic justice, protecting the environment [and] encouraging corporate responsibility.”
Of course, investing along religious principles — similar to ESG investment, which takes environmental, social, and corporate-governance factors into account when deciding what to do with your money — is fraught with complications, contradictions and problems with transparency. Regulators are cracking down on vehicles that “greenwash” their ESG credentials.
A major report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental organization with 38 member nations, found that ESG ratings vary strongly depending on the provider, as they commonly use different measures, indicators, metrics, data and qualitative judgments to make decisions about funds and companies.
“Moreover, returns have shown mixed results over the past decade, raising questions as to the true extent to which ESG drives performance,” the OECD said. “This lack of comparability of ESG metrics, ratings, and investing approaches makes it difficult for investors to draw the line between managing material ESG risks within their investment mandates.”
You have many funds to choose from. If you’re Catholic, you could look into the Global X S&P 500 Catholic Values ETF CATH
; the LKCM Aquinas Catholic Equity Fund AQEIX; or Ave Maria, which offers mutual funds for growth AVEGX, value AVEMX and bonds AVEFX AVEFX. You can read more here. Investing based on religious, moral or ethical principles doesn’t guarantee a satisfactory return.
It’s not too late to start investing at 53. With the advice of a financial adviser, your risk profile may need regular adjusting, based on your age and tolerance. But you may work into your 70s and may live into your 80s or 90s, and you will want to find myriad ways to build your wealth throughout your retirement. Cash-hoarding typically gets outdone by inflation.
You may find a job with a 401(k) and an employer match, meaning your employer will contribute an additional sum toward your retirement based on the amount you are contributing every month. You may also consider an IRA. Both account types have “catch-up” contributions for people who are over 50. Annual IRA contribution limits for 2023 are $6,500 for people under 50, but $7,500 for those 50 and older.
You can also use pretax dollars for health savings accounts, which are used to offset the burden of high-deductible healthcare plans. With the latter, you pay a lower premium, but you will be saddled with higher out-of-pocket expenses for medical services should you require them. You can contribute up to $4,150 to an HSA for 2024, up from $3,850 this year.
As for right now? Pay off your credit cards. Don’t let high-interest debt trap you. Warren Buffett said one of the best investments he ever made was buying his Omaha, Neb., home for $31,500 in 1958. It’s worth $1.4 million today. He has said he may have put that money to better use if he had rented instead, but owning your own home will solidify your financial position in retirement.
Investing $1,000 a month may be ambitious. But thinking in the medium to long term — and knowing this is a marathon rather than a sprint, even at 53 — is half the battle. With compounding, or making money off your principal and the increase in value of your initial investment, you could have more than $120,000 in 10 years, and over $600,000 in 30 years.
Bravo on this new chapter. Take it one day, one week and one month at a time, and enjoy your life.
You can email The Moneyist with any financial and ethical questions at qfottrell@marketwatch.com, and follow Quentin Fottrell on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Check out the Moneyist private Facebookgroup, where we look for answers to life’s thorniest money issues. Post your questions, tell me what you want to know more about, or weigh in on the latest Moneyist columns.
The Moneyist regrets he cannot reply to questions individually.
Exxon Mobil Corp. confirmed Wednesday an agreement to buy shale driller Pioneer Natural Resources Co. in an all-stock deal valued at $59.5 billion, or $64.5 billion including debt.
“Pioneer is a clear leader in the Permian with a unique asset base and people with deep industry knowledge,” said Exxon Mobil Chief Executive Darren Woods. “The combined capabilities of our two companies will provide long-term value creation well in excess of what either company is capable of doing on a standalone basis.”
Pioneer shares rose 1.9% in premarket trading, while Exxon’s stock fell 1.3%.
Under terms of the deal, Pioneer shareholders will receive 2.3234 Exxon shares XOM, -0.42%
for each Pioneer share PXD, +0.76%
they own. The companies said that based on the Oct. 5 closing prices of $108.99 for Exxon’s stock and $214.96 for Pioneer’s stock, the deal values Pioneer shares at $253.23 each, or a 17.8% premium.
The deal combines Pioneer’s more than 85,000 net acres in the Midland Basin with Exxon’s 570,000 net acres in the Delaware and Midland Basins. Combined, the companies will have an estimated 16 billion barrels of oil equivalent in the Permian.
Exxon, Pioneer merger provides an estimated combined 16 billion barrels of oil equivalent resource in the Permian.
Exxon Mobil Corp.
Exxon said the merger will increase its lower-cost-of-supply production and short-cycle capital flexibility. From Pioneer’s assets, the company expects a cost of supply of less than $35 per barrel.
Exxon said the deal will accelerate plans to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions in the Permian, as the company plans to use its own plans to accelerate Pioneer’s net-zero emissions plan by 15 years, to 2035.
The deal is expected to immediately add to Exxon’s earnings per share and free cash flow when it closes, which is expected to occur in the first half of 2024. The merger is expected to result in “significant” synergies.
Siebert Williams Shank analyst Gabriele Sorbara expects the deal, which “fits perfectly” for Exxon, to generate about $2 billion of synergies over the next decade. Sorbara also sees an “inflection to improved well productivity” in the second half of 2023 and beyond, which isn’t currently reflected in analyst expectations, so it boost the benefit to Exxon.
While Sorbara expects some scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission, but believes “the deal should ultimately close,” without the receipt of a competing bid.
Citi was lead financial advisor to Exxon, and Centerview Partners was financial advisor and Davis Polk & Wardwell was legal advisor. For Pioneer, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Petrie Partners and Bank of America Securities were financial advisors and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP was legal advisor.
Exxon’s stock has rallied 12.7% over the past 12 months through Tuesday and Pioneer shares have slipped 3.5%. In comparison, the Energy Select Sector SPDR ETF XLE
has climbed 11.6% and the S&P 500 index SPX
has advanced 21.4%.
Shares of GameStop Corp. surged Thursday, after the consumer electronics retailer named Ryan Cohen as it president and chief executive officer, effective immediately.
The move, which wasn’t unexpected, comes a few months after the company fired then-CEO Matthew Furlong, and elected activist investor Ryan Cohen as executive chairman. At that time, Cohen said in a tweet, “Not for long.”
Cohen will relinquish his role as executive chairman when he is appointed chairman.
GameStop’s stock GME shot up 9.9% in premarket trading, putting it on track to open at a three-week high.
Cohen, who previously founded and was CEO Chewy Inc. CHWY, -0.06%,
is the manager of RC Ventures, which in June disclosed a 36.85 million-share, or 12.1% stake in GameStop.
“In connection with his appointment, Mr. Cohen will assume the role of principal executive officer from Mark H. Robinson effective immediately and his responsibilities will include the oversight of all other executive officers, including Mr. Robinson,” the company said in a statement.
The company said Cohen will not receive any compensation for his roles as president, CEO and chairman, and will “continue to engage in various business activities and pursuits outside of the company.”
GameStop’s stock, which was one of the original “meme” stocks, has tumbled 37.2% over the past 12 months, while the S&P 500 index GME, +2.21%
has gained 14.9%.
LONDON — Back in the spring, Britain was sounding pretty relaxed about the rise of AI. Then something changed.
The country’s artificial intelligence white paper — unveiled in March — dealt with the “existential risks” of the fledgling tech in just four words: high impact, low probability.
Less than six months later, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak seems newly troubled by runaway AI. He has announced an international AI Safety Summit, referred to “existential risk” in speeches, and set up an AI safety taskforce with big global aspirations.
Helping to drive this shift in focus is a chorus of AI Cassandras associated with a controversial ideology popular in Silicon Valley.
Known as “Effective Altruism,” the movement was conceived in the ancient colleges of Oxford University, bankrolled by the Silicon Valley elite, and is increasingly influential on the U.K.’s positioning on AI.
Not everyone’s convinced it’s the right approach, however, and there’s mounting concern Britain runs the risk of regulatory capture.
The race to ‘God-like AI’
Effective altruists claim that super-intelligent AI could one day destroy humanity, and advocate policy that’s focused on the distant future rather than the here-and-now. Despite the potential risks, EAs broadly believe super-intelligent AI should be pursued at all costs.
“The view is that the outcome of artificial super-intelligence will be binary,” says Émile P. Torres, philosopher and former EA, turned critic of the movement. “That if it’s not utopia, it’s annihilation.”
In the U.K., key government advisers sympathetic to the movement’s concerns, combined with Sunak’s close contact with leaders of the AI labs – which have longstanding ties to the movement – have helped push “existential risk” right up the U.K.’s policy agenda.
When ChatGPT-mania reached its zenith in April, tech investor Ian Hogarth penned a viral Financial Times article warning that the race to “God-like AI” “could usher in the obsolescence or destruction of the human race” – urging policymakers and AI developers to pump the brakes.
It echoed the influential “AI pause” letter calling for a moratorium on “giant AI experiments,” and, in combination with a later letter saying AI posed an extinction risk, helped fuel a frenzied media cycle that prompted Sunak to issue a statement claiming he was “looking very carefully” at this class of risks.
Known as “Effective Altruism,” the movement was conceived in the ancient colleges of Oxford University, bankrolled by the Silicon Valley elite, and is increasingly influential on the U.K.’s positioning on AI | Carl Court/Getty Images
“These kinds of arguments around existential risk or the idea that AI would develop super-intelligence, that was very much on the fringes of credible discussion,” says Mhairi Aitken, an AI ethics researcher at the Alan Turing Institute. “That’s really dramatically shifted in the last six months.”
The EA community credited Hogarth’s FT article with telegraphing these ideas to a mainstream audience, and hailed his appointment as chair of the U.K.’s Foundation Model Taskforce as a significant moment.
Under Hogarth, who has previously invested in AI labs Anthropic, Faculty, Helsing, and AI safety firm Conjecture, the taskforce announced a new set of partners last week – a number of whom have ties to EA.
Three of the four partner organizations on the lineup are bankrolled by EA donors. The Centre for AI Safety is the organization behind the “AI extinction risk” letter (the “AI pause” letter was penned by another EA-linked organization, the Future of Life Institute). Its primary funding – to the tune of $5.2 million – comes from major EA donor organization, Open Philanthropy.
Another partner is Arc Evals, which “works on assessing whether cutting-edge AI systems could pose catastrophic risks to civilization.”
It’s a project of the Alignment Research Centre, an organization that has received $1.5 million from Open Philanthropy, $1.25 million from high-profile EA Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX Foundation (which it promised to return after the implosion of his crypto empire), and $3.25 million from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, set up by Skype founder and prominent EA, Jaan Tallinn. Arc Evals is advised by Open Philanthropy CEO, Harold Karnofsky.
Finally, the Community Intelligence Project, a body working on new governance models for transformative technology, began life with an FTX regrant, and a co-founder appealed to the EA community for funding and expertise this year.
Joining the taskforce as one of two researchers is Cambridge professor David Krueger, who has received a $1 million grant from Open Philanthropy to further his work to “reduce the risk of human extinction resulting from out-of-control AI systems”. He describes himself as “EA-adjacent.” One of the PhD students Kruger advises, Nitarshan Rajkumar, has been working with the British government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) as an AI policy adviser since April.
A range of national security figures and renowned computer scientist, Yoshua Bengio, are also joining the taskforce as advisers.
Combined with its rebranding as a “Frontier AI Taskforce” which projects its gaze into the future of AI development, the announcements confirmed the ascendancy of existential risk on the U.K.’s AI agenda.
‘X-risk’
Hogarth told the FT that biosecurity risks – like AI systems designing novel viruses – and AI-powered cyber-attacks weigh heavily on his mind.The taskforce is intended to address these threats, and to help build safe and reliable “frontier” AI models.
When ChatGPT-mania reached its zenith in April, tech investor Ian Hogarth penned a viral Financial Times article warning that the race to “God-like AI” “could usher in the obsolescence or destruction of the human race” | John Phillips/Getty Images
“The focus of the Frontier AI Taskforce and the U.K.’s broader AI strategy extends to not only managing risk, but ensuring the technology’s benefits can be harnessed and its opportunities realized across society,” said a government spokesperson, who disputed the influence of EA on its AI policy.
But some researchers worry that the more prosaic threats posed by today’s AI models, like bias, data privacy, and copyright issues, have been downgraded. It’s “a really dangerous distraction from the discussions we need to be having around regulation of AI,” says Aitken. “It takes a lot of the focus away from the very real and ethical risks and harms that AI presents today.”
The EA movement’s links to Silicon Valley also prompt some to question its objectivity. The three most prominent AI labs, OpenAI, DeepMind and Anthropic, all boast EA connections – with traces of the movement variously imprinted on their ethos, ideology and wallets.
Tech mogul Elon Musk claims to be a fan of the closely related “longtermist” ideology, calling it a “close match” to his own. Musk recently hired Dan Hendrycks, director of Center for AI Safety, as an adviser to his new start-up, xAI, which is also doing its part to prevent the AI apocalypse.
To counter the threat, the EA movement is throwing its financial heft behind the field of AI safety. Head of Open Philanthropy, Harold Karnofsky,wrote a February blog post announcing a leave of absence to devote himself to the field, while an EA career advice center, 80,000 hours, recommends “AI safety technical research” and “shaping future governance of AI” as the two top careers for EAs.
Tech mogul Elon Musk claims to be a fan of the closely related “longtermist” ideology, calling it a “close match” to his own | Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue
Trading in an insular jargon of “X-risk” (existential risks) and “p(doom)” (the probability of our impending annihilation), the AI-focused branch of effective altruism is fixated on issues like “alignment” – how closely AI models are attuned to humanity’s value systems – amid doom-laden warnings about “proliferation” – the unchecked propagation of dangerous AI.
Despite its popularity among a cohort of technologists,critics say the movement’s thinking lacks evidence and is alarmist. A vocal critic, former Googler Timnit Gebru, has denounced this “dangerous brand of AI safety,” noting that she’d seen the movement gain “alarming levels of influence” in Silicon Valley.
Meanwhile, the “strong intermingling” of EAs and companies building AI “has led…this branch of the community to be very subservient to the AI companies,” says Andrea Miotti, head of strategy and governance at AI safety firm Conjecture. He calls this a “real regulatory capture story.”
The pitch to industry
Citing the Center for AI Safety’s extinction risk letter, Hogarth called on AI specialists and safety researchers to join the taskforce’s efforts in June, noting that at “a pivotal moment, Rishi Sunak has stepped up and is playing a global leadership role.”
On stage at the Tony Blair Institute conference in July, Hogarth – perspiring in the midsummer heat but speaking with composed conviction – struck an optimistic note. “We want to build stuff that allows for the U.K. to really have the state capacity to, like, engineer the future here,” he said.
Although the taskforce was initially intended to build up sovereign AI capability, Hogarth’s arrival saw a new emphasis on AI safety. The U.K. government’s £100 million commitment is “the largest amount ever committed to this field by a nation state,” he tweeted.
Despite its popularity among a cohort of technologists,critics say the movement’s thinking lacks evidence and is alarmist | Hollie Adams/Getty Images
The taskforce recruitment ad was shared on the Effective Altruism forum, and Hogarth’s appointment was announced in Effective Altruism UK’s July newsletter.
Hogarth is not the only one in government who appears to be sympathetic to the EA movement’s arguments. Matt Clifford, chair of government R&D body, ARIA, and adviser to the AI taskforce as well as AI sherpa for the safety summit, has urged EAs to jump aboard the government’s latest AI safety push.
“I would encourage any of you who care about AI safety to explore opportunities to join or be seconded into government, because there is just a huge gap of knowledge and context on both sides,” he said at the Effective Altruism Global conference in London in June.
“Most people engaged in policy are not familiar … with arguments that would be familiar to most people in this room about risk and safety,” he added, but cautioned that hyping apocalyptic risks was not typically an effective strategy when it came to dealing with policymakers.
Clifford said that ARIA would soon announce directors who will be in charge of grant-giving across different areas. “When you see them, you will see there is actually a pretty good overlap with some prominent EA cause areas,” he told the crowd.
A British government spokesperson said Clifford is “not part of the core Effective Altruism movement.”
Civil service ties
Influential civil servants also have EA ties. Supporting the work of the AI taskforce is Chiara Gerosa, who in addition to her government work is facilitating an introductory AI safety course “for a cohort of policy professionals” for BlueDot Impact, an organization funded by Effective Ventures, a philanthropic fund that supports EA causes.
The course “will get you up to speed on extreme risks from AI and governance approaches to mitigating these risks,” according to the website, which states alumni have gone on to work for the likes of OpenAI, GovAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind.
People close to the EA movement say that its disciples see the U.K.’s AI safety push as encouragement to get involved and help nudge policy along an EA trajectory.
EAs are “scrambling to be part of Rishi Sunak’s announced Foundation Model Taskforce and safety conference,” according to an AI safety researcher who asked not to be named as they didn’t want to risk jeopardizing EA connections.
EAs are “scrambling to be part of Rishi Sunak’s announced Foundation Model Taskforce and safety conference,” according to an AI safety researcher | Pool photo by Justin Tallis via AFP/Getty Images
“One said that while Rishi is not the ‘optimal’ candidate, at least he knows X-risk,” they said. “And that ‘we’ need political buy-in and policy.”
“The foundation model taskforce is really centring the voices of the private sector, of industry … and that in many cases overlaps with membership of the Effective Altruism movement,” says Aitken. “That to me, is very worrying … it should really be centring the voices of impacted communities, it should be centring the voices of civil society.”
Jack Stilgoe, policy co-lead of Responsible AI, a body funded by the U.K.’s R&D funding agency, is concerned about “the diversity of the taskforce.” “If the agenda of the taskforce somehow gets captured by a narrow range of interests, then that would be really, really bad,” he says, adding that the concept of alignment “offers a false solution to an imaginary problem.”
A spokesperson for Open Philanthropy, Michael Levine, disputed that the EA movement carried any water for AI firms. “Since before the current crop of AI labs existed, people inspired by effective altruism were calling out the threats of AI and the need for research and policies to reduce these risks; many of our grantees are now supporting strong regulation of AI over objections from industry players.”
From Oxford to Whitehall, via Silicon Valley
Birthed at Oxford University by rationalist utilitarian philosopher William MacAskill, EA began life as a technocratic preoccupation with how charitable donations could be optimized to wring out maximal benefit for causes like global poverty and animal welfare.
Over time, it fused with transhumanist and techno-utopian ideals popular in Silicon Valley, and a mutated version called “long-termism” that is fixated on ultra-long-term timeframes now dominates. MacAskill’s most recent book What We Owe the Future conceptualizes a million-year timeframe for humanity and advocates the colonization of space.
EA began life as a technocratic preoccupation with how charitable donations could be optimized to wring out maximal benefit for causes like global poverty and animal welfare. Over time, it fused with transhumanist and techno-utopian ideals popular in Silicon Valley | Mason Trinca/Getty Images
Oxford University remains an ideological hub for the movement, and has spawned a thriving network of think tanks and research institutes that lobby the government on long-term or existential risks, including the Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI) and the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.
Other EA-linked organizations include Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, which was co-founded by Tallinn and receives funding from his Survival and Flourishing Fund – which is also the primary funder of the Centre for Long Term Resilience, set up by former civil servants in 2020.
The think tanks tend to overlap with leading AI labs, both in terms of membership and policy positions. For example, the founder and former director of GovAI, Allan Dafoe, who remains chair of the advisory board, is also head of long-term AI strategy and governance at DeepMind.
“We are conscious that dual roles of this form warrant careful attention to conflicts of interest,” reads the GovAI website.
GovAI, OpenAI and Anthropic declined to offer comment for this piece. A Google DeepMind spokesperson said: “We are focused on advancing safe and responsible AI.”
The movement has been accruing political capital in the U.K. for some time, says Luke Kemp, a research affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk who doesn’t identify as EA. “There’s definitely been a push to place people directly out of existential risk bodies into policymaking positions,” he says.
The movement has been accruing political capital in the U.K. for some time, says Luke Kemp, a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk who doesn’t identify as EA | Pool photo by Stefan Rousseau via AFP/Getty Images
CLTR’s head of AI policy, Jess Whittlestone, is in the process of being seconded to DSIT on a one day a week basis to assist on AI policy leading up to the AI Safety Summit, according to a CLTR August update seen by POLITICO. In the interim, she is informally advising several policy teams across DSIT.
A former specialist adviser to the Cabinet Office meanwhile, Markus Anderljung, is now head of policy at GovAI.
Kemp says he has expressed reservations about existential risk organizations attempting to get staff members seconded to government. “We can’t be trusted as objective and fair regulators or scholars, if we have such deep connections to the bodies we’re trying to regulate,” he says.
“I share the concern about AI companies dominating regulatory discussions, and have been advocating for greater independent expert involvement in the summit to reduce risks of regulatory capture,” said CLTR’s Head of AI Policy, Dr Jess Whittlestone. “It is crucial for U.K. AI policy to be informed by diverse perspectives.”
Instead of the risks of existing foundation models like GPT-4, EA-linked groups and AI companies tend to talk up the “emergent” risks of frontier models — a forward-looking stance that nudges the regulatory horizon into the future.
This framing “is a way of suggesting that that’s why you need to have Big Tech in the room – because they are the ones developing these frontier models,” suggests Aitken.
At the frontier
Earlier in July, CLTR and GovAI collaborated on a paper about how to regulate so-called frontier models, alongside members of DeepMind, OpenAI, and Microsoft and academics. The paper explored the controversial idea of licensing the most powerful AI models, a proposal that’s been criticized for its potential to cement the dominance of leading AI firms.
Earlier in July, CLTR and GovAI collaborated on a paper about how to regulate so-called frontier models, alongside members of DeepMind, OpenAI, and Microsoft and academics | Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty Images
CLTR presented the paper to No. 10 with the prime minister’s special advisers on AI and the director and deputy director of DSIT in attendance, according to the CLTR memo.
Such ideas appear to be resonating. In addition to announcing the “Frontier AI Taskforce”, the government said in September that the AI Summit would focus entirely on the regulation of “frontier AI.”
The British government disputes the idea that its AI policy is narrowly focused. “We have engaged extensively with stakeholders in creating our AI regulation white paper, and have received a broad and diverse range of views as part of the recently closed consultation process which we will respond to in due course,” said a spokesperson.
Spokespeople for CLTR and CSER said that both groups focus on risks across the spectrum, from near-term to long-term, while a CLTR spokesperson stressed that it’s an independent and non-partisan think tank.
Some say that it’s the external circumstances that have changed, rather than the effectiveness of the EA lobby. CSER professor Haydn Belfield, who identifies as an EA, says that existential risk think tanks have been petitioning the government for years – on issues like pandemic preparedness and nuclear risk in addition to AI.
Although the government appears more receptive to their overtures now, “I’m not sure we’ve gotten any better at it,” he says. “I just think the world’s gotten worse.”
Update: This story has been updated to clarify Luke Kemp’s job title.
NEW DELHI — With the clock likely ticking on his time in Downing Street, Rishi Sunak wants to secure a legacy on the world stage. The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be just what he needs.
The British prime minister faces a general election next year with his Conservative Party languishing 18 points behind the Labour opposition in the polls.
But though Sunak told reporters travelling with him to the G20 leaders’ summit in India this weekend he was “entirely confident” he can still win re-election, U.K. government insiders say the PM already has one eye on his possible post-Downing Street legacy.
Sunak takes pride in how he has helped repair the U.K.’s diplomatic standing after the rancour of Boris Johnson’s premiership and Liz Truss’ brief but disastrous stint in power. He sees the Windsor Framework — the agreement on post-Brexit trade checks in Ireland which markedly improved U.K. relations with the EU and the U.S. — as his signature achievement so far.
Now the bigger prize in Sunak’s sights is the opportunity to position the U.K. as the leading authority on the governance of AI.
“He sees it as one of his long-term legacy pieces,” one government adviser told POLITICO. “Shaping the world’s response to a paradigm-shifting technology would be a big deal — and it would be recognized as a big deal.” A second government official said Sunak “never misses a chance” to bring up AI.
There are several existing international forums for governments to discuss AI regulation, including a G7 process and the EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council. Sunak’s challenge is to convince countries to take the U.K. seriously as a place to bring existing initiatives together and fold in unrepresented countries. And that will require some skillful diplomacy.
From G20 to AI summit
Sunak used conversations with other world leaders at the G20 to drum up interest in his landmark AI safety summit, which is taking place in the U.K. in November. The invitation list has yet to be made public, but is expected to include a range of countries including China.
The prime minister told POLITICO en route to New Delhi: “So far, the response we’ve had has been really positive, people are really keen to participate and they recognize that the U.K. can play a leadership role in AI.”
At a technology-focused session of the summit on Sunday the PM made comments on the need to develop AI responsibly. He praised India for “bringing AI to the top of the agenda at the G20” and said that there was “an opportunity for human progress that could surpass the industrial revolution in both speed and breadth.”
He told leaders that first and foremost, the development of AI had to be done safely to manage risks. “This requires international cooperation,” he said. “The U.K. will be hosting the first ever international AI Safety Summit in November to help drive this forward.”
Sunak added that the technology must also be developed securely “to protect the digital economy from malevolent actors and states” and fairly to “ensure inclusivity.”
“Getting this right is one of the greatest challenges and opportunities of our age,” Sunak said. “Let’s work together to make sure we all benefit.”
Lacking luster
But to make Sunak’s summit a success — and help secure his legacy — he will be reliant on the buy-in and active participation of fellow world leaders.
Despite Sunak congratulating his host Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on a successful summit, the G20 was noteworthy for the absence of powerful figures including China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Sunak will be hoping to avoid similar ‘no shows’ at his AI summit. He has already been dealt a blow with news last month that U.S. President Joe Biden will not be attending.
Key European leaders have also failed to confirm their attendance. In comments to POLITICO, one French official questioned the need for U.K. mediation, given alternative international avenues for discussing AI.
Sunak’s experience at the G20 also demonstrates the difficulties of choreographing the good optics and effective diplomacy required for a successful summit.
Predictions from U.K. government figures that Sunak would be mobbed by the adoring public did not materialize in a locked-down New Delhi where there were few people on the streets.
There were also hiccups in Sunak’s summit agenda. He had been due to meet Modi at his house on Friday but that was replaced with a 20-minute meeting on the margins of the summit on Saturday. On Friday night Modi hosted President Biden for dinner instead. The two leaders held talks for about an hour.
A planned business reception for Sunak on Friday at the British High Commission was also cancelled, because of transport issues. Sunak’s spokesperson said rescheduling was “part and parcel” of any summit.
Things did improve over the weekend for the British PM. Modi and Sunak were filmed bear-hugging each other when they met. According to the U.K. government’s readout, Modi “noted the warm reception” Sunak had had in India, and the pair had agreed to continue moving towards a free trade agreement “at pace.”
The Indian government said Modi has now formally invited Sunak for a bilateral visit, after POLITICO reported that U.K. officials were already drawing up plans for a possible return trip for Sunak later this year.
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The company — which over the past few months has made some big leadership changes — reported a net loss of $2.8 million, or 1 cent a share, compared with $108.7 million, or 36 cents a share, in the same quarter last year. Revenue crept higher to $1.16 billion,…
In the race to rein in artificial intelligence, Western governments have hit a major bump in the road: they all want to win.
Officials from the European Union, the United States and other major economies are competing to write the definitive rules for artificial intelligence, including for the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
Rival summits will be held in the Fall with the aim to reach a coordinated plan between Western governments on how to regulate the emerging technology. But these upcoming events risk entrenching divisions between countries in ways that threaten to undermine efforts to draw up a unified international rulebook on AI. To make matters worse, some of the talks are now getting personal.
“Everyone is committed to making this work,” said a European Commission official involved in negotiations over AI rules. “But right now, there are a lot of egos in the room.”
Western politicians are keen to show voters they are on top of a technology that burst into the public’s consciousness, almost overnight.
AI advocates say the economic opportunities offered by rolling out the technology range from quicker diagnoses of diseases to the development of autonomous vehicles. Skeptics warn AI could lead to a surge in unemployment and — in the very worst scenarios — global armageddon, if automated systems gain uncontrollable power.
Experts argue a common Western rulebook is vital to allow companies that use the technology to operate with ease internationally because AI is inherently a cross-border tool. Common rules would also protect people from Berlin to Boston from the technology’s potential harms, including minority groups potentially suffering discrimination from automated AI tools.
“We really don’t have a systematic global response to what we should do about the many risks,” said Gary Marcus, a psychologist and cognitive scientist at New York University who wants to see greater checks on AI. “Every country is trying to do something on its own.”
While governments in the West argue among themselves, China is pressing ahead with its own rulebook. The Chinese Communist Party says it’s seeking to protect its citizens from the AI’s risks. But Beijing’s critics say its regulation will be designed to serve its authoritarian ends.
Governments in the West worry that China’s totalitarian take on AI, including the technology’s wholesale use for national security purposes, may gain ground across the developing world if they don’t promote their own blueprint as an alternative.
For this article, POLITICO spoke to six Western officials working on the AI summits, who were granted anonymity to discuss the challenges they face.
In September, officials from the G7 group of Western industrialized economies are expected to meet to finalize a blueprint for how to regulate AI, according to two officials with direct knowledge of the talks.
Western officials worry that China’s totalitarian take on AI may gain ground across the developing world if the West does not promote its own blueprint as an alternative | Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images
That gathering will then be followed by a more formal summit of G7 leaders, likely in October or November, the officials said. European and U.S. officials hope the G7 work will bolster their joint attempt to limit the risks of generative AI and develop safe ways to use the technology to jumpstart economic growth.
The U.K. has also pitched itself as a world leader on AI safety and is expected to host its own summit, in London in November. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak views the event as a chance to enhance the country’s role as a global player seven years after the country’s Brexit referendum.
Officials involved in these overlapping AI projects describe a complex diplomatic tussle. International rivalries, diplomatic realpolitik and — above all — fears about how China will promote its own AI rules have complicated preparations for the meetings. Not all Western capitals, particularly within the EU, view Beijing’s stance on AI as contradictory to their own.
Divisions on how best to police the technology have also slowed down the process of reaching agreement. The EU wants to take a more aggressive stance on policing AI, while the U.S., U.K. and Japan would prefer more industry-led commitments. It’s unclear whether these differences can be overcome before the proposed summits later this year.
Egos, not policy
Three Western officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, complained that people’s egos — and not efforts to regulate AI — had taken over discussions linked to the G7 and U.K. summit events.
Since the EU first proposed AI oversight to the G7 work in late April and followed that up with a two-page memo in late May to the U.S., representatives from cooperating governments have been sparring privately to take credit for the West’s plans, the officials added.
That behavior has included adding to the draft G7 document in ways that favored their own stance on AI governance; taking credit, publicly, for the conclusions of the upcoming G7 summit; and dismissing others’ views in often backhanded comments while drafting proposals.
Brussels wants its own AI legislation, which is expected to be completed by December, to form the basis of measures adopted by other leading democracies, according to two European Commission officials involved in that process. That plan involves pushing for mandatory curbs on how AI is deployed in so-called “high-risk” cases like the use of facial recognition technology in law enforcement.
Washington is eager to press its more industry-friendly approach, and the White House published a set of voluntary commitments that Amazon and Microsoft have agreed to support. These non-binding pledges, which include promises to allow outsiders to test the firms’ AI systems for biases and other societal safeguards, are, in part, an effort to get ahead of similar proposals at the heart of the G7’s upcoming summit, according to one U.S. official.
“Any kind of international level agreement will have to be at the level of very vague principles,” said Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a computer scientist at Brown University, who co-wrote the White House’s guidelines for how U.S. agencies should oversee AI. “Everyone wants to do their own thing.”
LONDON — Britain has spent years seeking its place in the world after Brexit. Now it seems to have found a role … as a global conference center, where the great powers gather to talk.
Without a seat at the European table in Brussels, and also excluded from power-play summits between the EU and Washington, Britain hopes to wield its own “convening power” as it reboots its foreign policy ambitions.
Indeed almost every time a major global issue has raised its head of late — climate change; war in Ukraine, the rise of AI; the energy crisis — Britain’s answer has been to host another world summit.
Hot on the heels of this summer’s Ukraine Recovery Conference in London, U.K. government officials are now busy prepping for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s “major global summit on AI safety,” due to be held later this year.
That event will be followed next spring by a global energy security conference, timed to mark the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And all this less than two years after Britain played host to COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Glasgow.
This “summit frenzy”, as one European diplomat laughingly describes it, has not gone unnoticed in foreign capitals. But as more and more powerstry a similar middleman strategy, the U.K. may have a fight on its hands to stand out.
“This is really our bread and butter,” said Alicia Kearns, Conservative chair of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee. “One of our strongest diplomatic offers to the world is our ability to convene people. I think it’s a really important aspect of our diplomacy.”
“UK-hosted forums and conferences deliver real-world results, and position us as a leading voice on a range of important issues,” a U.K. government spokesperson told POLITICO, in response to questions about its summit strategy.
They are a “vital part of the diplomatic toolkit, giving us the opportunity to bring together governments and experts … and yield commitments which translate into real and lasting change for the better.”
Leading or following?
Hosting international conferences is hardly a new venture for the U.K. — but its efforts to act as global broker have been given fresh prominence in the wake of Brexit.
Former Prime Minister David Cameron’s Syria donor conference in early 2016 raised more than $10 billion to help pay for food, medical care and shelter in the war-torn country. Two years earlier, Cameron’s Foreign Secretary William Hague had gathered global ministers — and a Hollywood megastar — in London to combat the use of rape as a weapon of war. A follow-up was held in Westminster last year.
Britain’s big post-Brexit foreign policy reset, known as the “Integrated Review” and published in March 2021, made the national mission explicit. “Shaping the open international order of the future: we will use our convening power and work with partners to reinvigorate the international system,” the plan promised.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak should not confuse a convening role with that of actual leadership | Pool photo by Henry Nicholls/Getty Images
Its author, the academic John Bew, continues to advise Sunak on foreign policy today. And multiple current and former advisers and diplomats agree that playing the role of eager host makes sense for the U.K. these days.
“People can pretty much rely that if they come to London for an international summit it will be well-organized,” Peter Ricketts, a former head of the U.K. diplomatic service, said. He cited Britain’s strong diplomatic reputation for drafting sound communiqués and brokering compromises.
But Ricketts noted Britain should not confuse a convening role with that of actual leadership. “The U.K. is not big enough to provide global leadership on any of these huge issues,” he said, referencing energy, climate change and artificial intelligence.
“Inevitably the Americans are going to be in the lead on setting governance for AI norms and so on,” he added.” The other players will be the Chinese, for their huge market power, and in third place — perhaps a long way behind — is the EU.”
COP out
Hosting a major global conference is one thing — making it count is another matter.
A former adviser to the U.K.’s foreign office, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said the hosting of conferences “in and of themselves doesn’t hold massive value.” More critical is the follow-up work to ensure they “catalyze change or investment and serve a purpose.”
“It’s how you leverage it that matters, and its legacy,” the ex-adviser cautioned. “They take an awful lot of work, and done badly are just talking shops.”
Some believe there are lessons for the U.K. to learn from the aftermath of COP26, when the eyes of the world were on Glasgow for two weeks of high-stakes climate summitry.
Nick Mabey, who advised the U.K. government on COP26 and founded the E3G climate think tank, said the British played a “good game” in their organization of the event — but then appeared to drop “its own ball in the follow-up” as initiatives got delayed while the Conservative Party burned through three prime ministers.
“That did damage the U.K.’s reputation quite strongly among core allies, and other countries. It was seen not to have followed up as strongly across all of the things that it launched at COP26,” he said.
Mabey cited the forest declaration, an agreement which aims to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030, as an example of an initiative he thinks has fallen in priority.
But the U.K. government spokesperson quoted above insisted its “track record” on delivery “speaks for itself.”
“In the last two years alone, 190 countries agreed to phase down coal power at COP26, $60 billion was raised at the Ukraine Recovery Conference and an international declaration on ending Sexual Violence in Conflict was signed by over 50 countries.”
Unlike summits hosted by bigger powers — or meetings like COP that are part of an established United Nations process — Britain will, Mabey warned, really need to “hustle” to get a turnout at its own events.
“The international calendar is going to become a lot more crowded, as other countries will be doing the ‘middle power strategy’ to get their place in the sun too, whether that is the South Africas or Brazils,” he said.
Testing the waters
The European diplomat quoted at the top of the story, granted anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record, agreed there is now a “little bit of summit competition” among the larger capitals.
Many leaders, he said, see the benefits of playing host: they find it easier to bag coveted bilateral meetings with important counterparts on the sidelines — especially useful for U.K. prime ministers who no longer have bi-monthly meetings with the EU27 in the calendar.
Italy has spied its own conference opportunity through the Rome Med — an annual gathering of Mediterranean leaders which began in 2015. In June, French President Emmanuel Macron convened a global finance conference in an effort to unlock trillions of dollars for the fight against climate change.
But not everyone wants to be the first mover, the diplomat added, citing risks for the U.K. in taking ownership of hot-button issues like AI.
“You have capitals that don’t necessarily want to be the first to host a summit on a specific topic,” he said. “Maybe they want to host the second or the third, or further down the line, so that they can test the waters and see if that thing flies or it doesn’t fly.”
He added: “If a summit is a failure, it doesn’t look very good for the host.”
For Britain, still seeking its new place in the world three-and-a-half years after Brexit, it seems to be a risk worth taking.
WREXHAM, Wales — Sitting in the Royal Oak, a narrow but implausibly long pub in Wrexham’s town center, Gary Tipping is reflecting on the rollercoaster fortunes of his favorite football team.
Wrexham Association Football Club (A.F.C.) — a lower-league team barely recognizable since it was bought up by Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney in 2021 — has just lost its opening game of the season. But little can dampen the enthusiasm of Tipping or his fellow fans.
“What they’ve done for this town, it’s beyond what I could have ever dreamed of,” he says.
“People want to see the town and breathe in the atmosphere here,” adds his 21-year-old son Sam, who’s been going to the football with Gary since he was 5 years old. “There’s a hype around the place.”
“Hype” was not a word formerly associated with Wrexham. The third-oldest professional football club in the world, it had fallen on hard times and was struggling to stay afloat in the 2010s. But everything changed when Reynolds and McElhenney arrived, in search of a project and with movie-star money to spend.
Wrexham’s fortunes were transformed by new players and a new manager, financed by American dollars. The fans flooded back. A Netflix documentary series charting their progress, “Welcome to Wrexham,” was a smash hit on both sides of the Atlantic. In May, the rejuvenated team was promoted back into the professional football league after a 15-year absence.
The town, too, feels like a different place.
Strolling through a lively Wrexham high street on a Saturday night, local call center worker Christopher Lamb points out a raft of new bars that have opened over the past two years.
“The town was going downhill for quite a while since 2010. But it’s changed a lot. Now you get a lot of American tourists here — though they don’t always go to the places that need the money,” Lamb says.
But not every ailing football club — nor every ailing town — finds a superhero.
Football in the English leagues — where Wrexham play, despite the town’s north Wales location — is a wildly unequal game. The hundreds of millions of pounds powering top-level Premier League clubs contrast sharply with the tiny budgets of lower-league teams, most of whom struggle just to stay afloat.
Wrexham faced the same endless financial battles before its unlikely takeover, with financial distress leaving the team at its lowest sporting ebb. Other clubs under constant threat of extinction look on in envy, and with a lingering sense of injustice.
Wrexham’s fortunes were transformed by new players and a new manager, financed by American dollars | Malcolm Couzens/Getty Images
Knights in shining armor?
“You’ve got wonderful things like Wrexham — that’s a dream isn’t it?” says Jenny Chapman, formerly the MP for the northeast town of Darlington, and now a Labour member of the House of Lords. “We were hoping for that knight in shining armor.”
First elected to parliament in 2010, Chapman was thrust straight into a local nightmare: the imminent collapse of her town’s beloved football club.
Darlington F.C. had been placed into emergency financial proceedings multiple times through the 2000s, having gambled unwisely on an outsized new stadium on the outskirts of the town. That purchase had been covered in part by a £4 million loan taken out by the club’s former owner, George Reynolds — who arrived with ambitions of taking the club to the Premier League, but ended up in prison for tax avoidance.
“It was a very difficult period and it was overwhelming,” Chapman recalls.
“I’m not a football fan at all, never pretended to be. But I felt very strongly that Darlington was a club with a real heritage to it and it was an important part of the community that needed to be supported and should survive,” she adds.
As the club desperately looked for a buyer to save it from liquidation, Chapman spent hours each day on the phone with the club’s administrator, and tried to vet and cajole prospective buyers.
It was to no avail. Darlington was eventually expelled from the Football Association in 2012. A phoenix club — owned by fans — was formed in its place, and is currently attempting to rise from the very bottom of the English football pyramid.
“There definitely wasn’t any support from Westminster,” Chapman recalls.
But a decade on, there are signs Westminster is starting to pay attention. A similar collapse in 2019 at Bury F.C. — another lower-league cub in the north of England — grabbed headlines far beyond the Greater Manchester area, and happened just as the politics around football were starting to shift.
The constituencies containing Wrexham, Bury and Darlington all flipped from Labour to the Conservatives in 2019. All could be characterized as the kind of “Red Wall” seats that the Tories had promised under Boris Johnson to “level up” and regenerate after years of post-industrial decline.
Football is of particular importance in these seats. Research by the center-right Onward think tank earlier this year showed that people in the north of England “are more likely to view their local football team as one of the main sources of pride in the local area.”
“You’ve got to think about the institutions that are fundamental and core to these places,” says Tory MP John Stevenson, chair of the Northern Research Group, a backbench Conservative caucus focused on supporting northern England.
Bury F.C. was expelled from the English Football League in 2019, after failing in its bid to find a buyer | WPA pool photo by Danny Lawson/Getty Images
“I always come up with two: one is universities and the second one is football clubs. As a social enterprise, an economic enterprise and a sporting one, football clubs are very much at the forefront of their communities.”
Dead and Bury’d
Bury was expelled from the English Football League in 2019, after the cash-strapped club failed in its bid to find a buyer. Onward’s research shows that northern clubs — like Bury and Darlington — have been particularly exposed to financial stress, often by unscrupulous owners who stretched them far beyond their means.
In response to Bury’s expulsion, Conservative MP and former Sports Minister Tracey Crouch was commissioned by Johnson’s government to carry out a fan-led review into the governance of English football clubs. The review, published in November 2021, recommended a new, independent regulator for English football and the introduction of tests to better police club ownership.
The government accepted Crouch’s call to establish a regulator in a white paper — a draft legislative document — responding to her review. But there’s no sign yet of any legislation to formally enact her recommendations, prompting angry claims of foot-dragging.
“The fan-led review went a long way … but it seems incredibly slow. It’s taken two years just for a white paper to come forward,” says Christian Wakeford, the MP for Bury North — who switched from the Conservatives to Labour last year.
“There are so many clubs that are on that threshold of not existing anymore — we don’t want anymore Burys. It’s not fair for the fans and it’s not fair for a town,” he adds.
Tory MP and NRG Chair Stevenson adds: “I’m of the belief that governments of all persuasions neglected [and] ignored northern communities. It’s not just about economies, it’s also about communities. And football clubs are very much part of that.”
A government official pointed POLITICO to a speech made by Sports Minister Stuart Andrew in June to the English Football League’s annual conference, in which he acknowledged that there are “a number of clubs across the EFL that are in real distress today.” Andrew said the government intends to publish its response to a consultation on the white paper “in the coming weeks.”
While some MPs eagerly await the government’s next move, not everyone is convinced it’s the state’s place to try to save clubs from the vagaries of the market — particularly given that the country’s top flight appears to be in rude health.
Tory peer and West Ham United Vice Chairman Karren Brady said last year that “much of [the fan-led review] should be welcomed like a giant hole in Wembley’s pitch.”
“It is messing with an industry which works better than most, and it’s hard to see what football has in common with banks or other financial institutions who also have regulators,” she wrote in the Sun newspaper. “We have to remember the Premier League is the envy of world sport, so why break it because Bury went bust?”
This is Wrexham
Back in Wrexham, the signs of what forward-thinking — and extremely wealthy — owners can do are on full display. It’s little surprise that MPs keen for their own local success story are eyeing the club with envy.
Wrexham may have lost its opening game of the season, but little can dampen the enthusiasm of its fans | Malcolm Couzens/Getty Images
“All of a sudden, everyone knows who Wrexham is — it’s had a massive effect,” says Geraint Andrews, a local engineer standing outside another thriving town center bar.
Indeed, the whole town center is awash with Wrexham A.F.C. replica shirts and memorabilia dedicated to the club and the “This Is Wrexham” documentary series. A Wrexham A.F.C. mural adorns the glass of the town’s branch of McDonald’s. U.S. flags held by tourists or fans who have taken the Hollywood stars to heart are only narrowly outnumbered by Welsh national flags.
Since the takeover in 2021, the town of Wrexham has even been officially upgraded to a city. Amid the takeover buzz, it was also shortlisted for the U.K. City of Culture title last year.
For fans of other small-town clubs, like Bury and Darlington — not to mention the currently struggling Derby County — just some stability would do.
“Not everybody can win the league,” Stevenson of the Northern Research Group notes.
“But through the good times and the difficult times, you want clubs to have financial stability and good management. That’s what we’re asking for.”
PARIS — An ongoing military coup in Niger is threatening to destabilize one of the last Western allies in Africa’s Sahel region.
On Wednesday night, Niger’s top military brass announced on national television they had overthrown the country’s president Mohamed Bazoum, who was democratically elected in 2021.
“We, the Defense and Security Forces, united within the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland, have decided to put an end to the regime you know,” Colonel Major Amadou Abdramane said, according to Agence France-Presse. “This follows the continuing deterioration of the security situation, and poor economic and social governance,” he added.
A change of regime in Niger could be a blow to the West — and more specifically to France and the United States, who have strong ties to the West African nation.
For both Paris and Washington, Niger is a strategic country in the fight against Islamist terrorism. Viewed as “one of the most reliable U.S. allies” against al Qaeda, Islamic State and Boko Haram, it’s also one of the last Sahel nations that hasn’t deepened cooperation with Russia to the West’s detriment.
According to Le Monde, there are no obvious signs of Moscow’s footprint in the Niger coup, which is mostly driven by internal matters.
However the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary outfit led by Yevgeny Prigozhin that is active in Africa, claimed credit for the coup Thursday.
“What happened is the struggle of the people of Niger against the colonialists,” Prigozhin said in a voice message posted in a Wagner-branded Telegram channel. “This is actually gaining independence and getting rid of the colonialists.” ㅤ “This shows the effectiveness of Wagner,” Prigozhin continued. “A thousand Wagner fighters are able to restore order and destroy terrorists, preventing them from harming the civilian population of states.”
The same channel also posted a photo of Prigozhin shaking hands with an unidentified man on the sidelines of a Russia-Africa summit being hosted in St Petersburg by President Vladimir Putin. The posts appeared intended as a demonstration of strength by Prigozhin, who led a mutiny last month in which his troops marched to within 200 km of Moscow before standing down.
For France, Bazoum’s forced departure would mark yet another setback in the region, only months after French troops had to withdraw from neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali, effectively ending the Barkhane operation.
Paris, whose influence in West Africa has been significantly waning in recent years, has reportedly deployed about 1,500 French soldiers in Niger. The government in Niger has expressed satisfaction at the bilateral military agreement. The country was supposed to be a “laboratory” for a new type of military relationship based on equal-footing cooperation between France — a former colonial power — and African governments.
The French foreign affairs ministry issued a statement overnight expressing “concerns” about the events, adding it “firmly condemns any attempt to seize power by force.” The ministry also released a warning message for French citizens living in Niger, urging them to limit movements and follow safety instructions.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with Bazoum overnight and expressed the U.S.’s “unwavering” support. “The strong U.S. economic and security partnership with Niger depends on the continuation of democratic governance and respect for the rule of law and human rights,” according to a statement.
For France, the coup’s timing is challenging, as French President Emmanuel Macron is on a five-day visit to the Indo-Pacific region with his Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu and most of his staff. Blinken is currently also in the region.
Douglas Busvine contributed to this report. This story has been updated with comments by Prigozhin.
This week, Fortune released its Modern Board 25 list that features the most innovative boards of directors among S&P 500 companies. Marie Myers, CFO at HP Inc., is on the board of F5, a Seattle-based cyber security and application delivery firm, which earned the No. 1 spot on the list.
Myers isn’t on HP’s board of directors, which earned the No. 7 spot, but as CFO, she regularly interacts with the board. The Modern Board’s ranking is based on criteria including the expertise, independence, diversity, and tenure of board membership. Myers shares with me her perspective on why both boards work so well.
“I believe leadership and culture are what make F5 and its board so effective, and those traits are what first drew me to joining its board,” says Myers, who joined in January 2019. “CEO Francois Locoh-Donou is a phenomenal leader, as is Alan Higginson, the chairman of the board. Together they have built a board that reflects the company F5 aims to be. It’s not just what it does, but also how it does it.”
She continues, “F5’s human-first and high-performing culture fosters inclusivity and purpose among employees and the board. A lot of companies strive to be inclusive, but at F5 it happens naturally.”
There’s also a high degree of collaboration between the board and the leadership team, and chemistry is a factor, Myers says. “Chemistry is why the board and leadership come together organically outside of the normal schedule of board meetings to discuss evolving situations and tackle complex business matters,” she says.
A combination of her experience, “passion for digital transformation,” and financial acumen, have all been especially useful in the director role, Myers explains. “Similarly, having the opportunity to participate in several large-scale transformations in my career provides a great foundation to navigate the broader environment at the board level,” she says.
‘CFOs need to be knowledgeable about all aspects of the business’
Myers, who has nearly 25 years of experience at HP, became the tech giant’s acting CFO in 2020 and was named CFO in 2021. Before being named CFO, Myers served as HP’s chief transformation officer, where she led the company’s IT and Transformation organizations.
“I’ve always been proud of the fact that HP’s board is one of the most diverse in the technology industry,” Myers says. “There is a broad mix of gender, age, ethnicity, and experience. This brings diversity of thought to every discussion and challenge the board and our company faces.” There’s chemistry among HP’s board and leadership team, as well, she says.
Any advice for CFOs when forging a relationship with the board? “The role of the CFO is evolving beyond traditional finance and accounting boundaries,” Myers explains. “For example, leveraging data and analytics to become more strategic advisors and partners to the business. This is also true of CFO interactions with the board.”
She continues, “I think it’s important to establish a direct and collaborative relationship with board members. Today’s CFOs need to be knowledgeable about all aspects of the business, have a broad and informed view of the company, and share their unique insights with the board, not just financials.”
Her most important advice: “Above all, CFOs need to communicate with transparency and always act with integrity to build trust and credibility with the board,” Myers says.
Enjoy your weekend, and have a Happy Mother’s Day. See you on Monday.
Gallup released a report on Thursday regarding Americans’ perceptions of the best long-term investment, and gold is perceived to have more value than stocks. Real estate came in first as the best bet for a long-term investment (34%). This is down from last year’s record-high of 45%. “Higher interest rates over the past year have cooled the housing market, dampening consumer exuberance about real estate as an investment,” according to Gallup.
The perception that gold is best increased from 15% in 2022 to 26% today. As a result, gold has overtaken stocks for second position. This year, fewer Americans (18%) than in 2022 (24%) see stocks or mutual funds as the best investment due to U.S. stock indices failing to gain ground over the past year. Today’s preference for stocks is on the low end of the 17% to 27% range of Americans choosing it since 2011, the research found. The latest poll was conducted April 3-25.
Cathy R. Smith was named CFO at Nordstrom, Inc. (NYSE: JWN), effective May 29. Smith joins Nordstrom from Bright Health Group, where she has served as chief financial and administrative officer since 2020. Before Bright Health, Smith worked as the CFO for Target Corporation for five years. During that time, Target achieved double-digit revenue and EPS growth. Before Target, Smith served as CFO for public companies Express Scripts, Walmart International, Gamestop, Centex, Kennametal, Textron, and Raytheon.
James “Jay” Saccaro was named VP and CFO at GE HealthCare (Nasdaq: GEHC), effective June 1. Saccaro succeeds Helmut Zodl who is remaining with the company to lead special projects regarding separation from GE. Saccaro joins GE HealthCare from Baxter International, where he has been serving as EVP and CFO since 2015. Before rejoining Baxter, he was SVP and CFO at Hill-Rom Corporation.
Todd Tuckner was named Group CFO at UBS. Tuckner will take on the role at the close of the acquisition of Credit Suisse. Having joined UBS in 2004, Tuckner is currently CFO and head of business performance and risk management for Global Wealth Management. Tuckner will succeed Sarah Youngwood, who has decided to leave the firm after the transaction closes. Youngwood joined UBS in 2022.
Kapil Agrawal was named CFO at Outschool, an education platform that offers a variety of small-group classes online. Agrawal brings experience in finance and international expansion. Most recently, he served as interim CFO at Poshmark. He was also pivotal in improving Poshmark’s gross margins, unit economics, and profitability. Before Poshmark, Agrawal served as global head of pricing at Uber Technologies, and head of business strategy at Capital One.
Gayle Jardine was named interim CFO at Coda Octopus Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: CODA), a real-time 3D/4D/5D and 6D imaging sonar technology company, effective May 4. The company’s CFO, Nathan Parker, has departed from his role, effective May 3. Jardine joined Coda Octopus Group as its European director of finance in 2015. Before that, she was the owner and director of Pentland Accounting Limited. Jardine also previously served as the operations and finance manager for Wireless Fibre Systems.
Howard Fu was promoted to CFO and treasurer at Procore Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: PCOR), a global provider of construction management software, effective May 8. After four years as CFO and treasurer at Procore, Paul Lyandres is stepping into the newly-created president. Fu most recently served as SVP of finance at Procore for two years. Previously, Fu served as VP of financial planning and analysis at DocuSign. Before that, he led the sales finance and M&A finance teams at Salesforce.
Marcus Glover was named EVP and CFO at Bally’s Corporation (NYSE: BALY). Bobby Lavan, Bally’s current CFO, will be leaving the company to pursue another opportunity. Most recently, Glover served as chief strategy officer for QPSI LLC, a supply chain solutions and contract packaging company. Before that, he served as president and COO of the Borgata Hotel, Casino & Spa, and president and COO of the Beau Rivage Resort & Casino. Glover was also a senior executive with Caesars Entertainment in various positions, including SVP and general manager for the Horseshoe Casino and Thistledown Racino, assistant general manager at Harrah’s/Caesars Entertainment St. Louis, Mo., and VP of operations at Harrah’s/Caesars Entertainment in Biloxi, Miss.
Gary W. Ferrera was named EVP and CFO at Driven Brands Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq: DRVN), an automotive services company, effective May 10. Ferrera succeeds Tiffany Mason. Most recently, Ferrera served as the CFO of Skillsoft Corporation, an educational software company. Before Skillsoft, he spent four years as the CFO of Cardtronics, PLC, an owner/operator of ATMs. He also served as CFO at DigitalGlobe, Inc., Intrawest Resorts Holdings, Inc., Great Wolf Resorts, Inc., National CineMedia, Inc., and Unity Media.
Overheard
“Sadly, the Great Resignation is not over for mothers. The fact that a significant percentage of mothers are leaving the workforce or changing jobs due to the lack of affordable childcare and the need to stay at home with their children is concerning.”
—Jill Koziol, Motherly CEO and cofounder, told Fortune in an interview. Motherly’s recent State of Motherhood report surveyed nearly 10,000 mothers. Eighteen percent of mothers changed jobs or completely left the workforce this past year; 28% said they wanted to stay home with the kids, and 15% said they didn’t have childcare options, the research found. For 64% of at-home moms, flexible work schedules would get them to return to the workforce. And 52% said affordable childcare would.
Ramping up production of a new product, using relatively new technology, is a tall order in the best of times. Electric-vehicle startups Rivian Automotive Inc. RIVN, Fisker Inc FSR and Lucid Group Inc. LCID are finding out that it is extra hard in the middle of economic uncertainty, lingering supply-chain worries, rising interest rates and less patient investors.
For Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, next month’s election is of massive historical significance.
It falls 100 years after the foundation of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secular republic and, if Erdoğan wins, he will be empowered to put even more of his stamp on the trajectory of a geostrategic heavyweight of 85 million people. The fear in the West is that he will see this as his moment to push toward an increasingly religiously conservative model, characterized by regional confrontationalism, with greater political powers centered around himself.
The election will weigh heavily on security in Europe and the Middle East. Who is elected stands to define: Turkey’s role in the NATO alliance; its relationship with the U.S., the EU and Russia; migration policy; Ankara’s role in the war in Ukraine; and how it handles tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The May 14 vote is expected to be the most hotly contested race in Erdoğan’s 20-year rule — as the country grapples with years of economic mismanagement and the fallout from a devastating earthquake.
He will face an opposition aligned behind Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, nicknamed the “Turkish Gandhi,” who is promising big changes. Polls suggest Kılıçdaroğlu has eked out a lead, but Erdoğan is a hardened election campaigner, with the full might of the state and its institutions at his back.
“There will be a change from an authoritarian single-man rule, towards a kind of a teamwork, which is a much more democratic process,” Ünal Çeviköz, chief foreign policy adviser to Kılıçdaroğlu told POLITICO. “Kılıçdaroğlu will be the maestro of that team.”
Here are the key foreign policy topics in play in the vote:
EU and Turkish accession talks
Turkey’s opposition is confident it can unfreeze European Union accession talks — at a standstill since 2018 over the country’s democratic backsliding — by introducing liberalizing reforms in terms of rule of law, media freedoms and depoliticization of the judiciary.
The opposition camp also promises to implement European Court of Human Rights decisions calling for the release of two of Erdoğan’s best-known jailed opponents: the co-leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party Selahattin Demirtaş and human rights defender Osman Kavala.
“This will simply give the message to all our allies, and all the European countries, that Turkey is back on track to democracy,” Çeviköz said.
Even under a new administration, however, the task of reopening the talks on Turkey’s EU accession is tricky.
Turkey’s opposition is aligned behind Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, nicknamed the “Turkish Gandhi” | Burak Kara/Getty Images
Anti-Western feeling in Turkey is very strong across the political spectrum, argued Wolfango Piccoli, co-founder of risk analysis company Teneo.
“Foreign policy will depend on the coherence of the coalition,” he said. “This is a coalition of parties who have nothing in common apart from the desire to get rid of Erdoğan. They’ve got a very different agenda, and this will have an impact in foreign policy.”
“The relationship is largely comatose, and has been for some time, so, they will keep it on life support,” he said, adding that any new government would have so many internal problems to deal with that its primary focus would be domestic.
Europe also seems unprepared to handle a new Turkey, with a group of countries — most prominently France and Austria — being particularly opposed to the idea of rekindling ties.
“They are used to the idea of a non-aligned Turkey, that has departed from EU norms and values and is doing its own course,” said Aslı Aydıntaşbaş a visiting fellow at Brookings. “If the opposition forms a government, it will seek a European identity and we don’t know Europe’s answer to that; whether it could be accession or a new security framework that includes Turkey.”
“Obviously the erosion of trust has been mutual,” said former Turkish diplomat Sinan Ülgen, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Europe think tank, arguing that despite reticence about Turkish accession, there are other areas where a complementary and mutually beneficiary framework could be built, like the customs union, visa liberalization, cooperation on climate, security and defense, and the migration agreement.
The opposition will indeed seek to revisit the 2016 agreement with the EU on migration, Çeviköz said.
“Our migration policy has to be coordinated with the EU,” he said. “Many countries in Europe see Turkey as a kind of a pool, where migrants coming from the east can be contained and this is something that Turkey, of course cannot accept,” he said but added. “This doesn’t mean that Turkey should open its borders and make the migrants flow into Europe. But we need to coordinate and develop a common migration policy.”
NATO and the US
After initially imposing a veto, Turkey finally gave the green light to Finland’s NATO membership on March 30.
But the opposition is also pledging to go further and end the Turkish veto on Sweden, saying that this would be possible by the alliance’s annual gathering on July 11. “If you carry your bilateral problems into a multilateral organization, such as NATO, then you are creating a kind of a polarization with all the other members of NATO with your country,” Çeviköz said.
A protester pushes a cart with a RRecep Tayyip Erdoğan doll during an anti-NATO and anti-Turkey demonstration in Sweden | Jonas Gratzer/Getty Images
A reelected Erdoğan could also feel sufficiently empowered to let Sweden in, many insiders argue. NATO allies did, after all, play a significant role in earthquake aid. Turkish presidential spokesperson İbrahim Kalın says that the door is not closed to Sweden, but insists the onus is on Stockholm to determine how things proceed.
Turkey’s military relationship with the U.S. soured sharply in 2019 when Ankara purchased the Russian-made S-400 missile system, a move the U.S. said would put NATO aircraft flying over Turkey at risk. In response, the U.S. kicked Ankara out of the F-35 jet fighter program and slapped sanctions on the Turkish defense industry.
A meeting in late March between Kılıçdaroğlu and the U.S. Ambassador to Ankara Jeff Flake infuriated Erdoğan, who saw it as an intervention in the elections and pledged to “close the door” to the U.S. envoy. “We need to teach the United States a lesson in this elections,” the irate president told voters.
In its policy platform, the opposition makes a clear reference to its desire to return to the F-35 program.
Russia and the war in Ukraine
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Turkey presented itself as a middleman. It continues to supply weapons — most significantly Bayraktar drones — to Ukraine, while refusing to sanction Russia. It has also brokered a U.N. deal that allows Ukrainian grain exports to pass through the blockaded Black Sea.
Highlighting his strategic high-wire act on Russia, after green-lighting Finland’s NATO accession and hinting Sweden could also follow, Erdoğan is now suggesting that Turkey could be the first NATO member to host Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Maybe there is a possibility” that Putin may travel to Turkey on April 27 for the inauguration of the country’s first nuclear power reactor built by Russian state nuclear energy company Rosatom, he said.
Çeviköz said that under Kılıçdaroğlu’s leadership, Turkey would be willing to continue to act as a mediator and extend the grain deal, but would place more stress on Ankara’s status as a NATO member.
“We will simply emphasize the fact that Turkey is a member of NATO, and in our discussions with Russia, we will certainly look for a relationship among equals, but we will also remind Russia that Turkey is a member of NATO,” he said.
Turkey’s relationship with Russia has become very much driven by the relationship between Putin and Erdoğan and this needs to change, Ülgen argued.
Turkey brokered a U.N. deal that allows Ukrainian grain exports to pass through the blockaded Black Sea | Ozan Kose/AFP via Getty Images
“No other Turkish leader would have the same type of relationship with Putin, it would be more distant,” he said. “It does not mean that Turkey would align itself with the sanctions; it would not. But nonetheless, the relationship would be more transparent.”
Syria and migration
The role of Turkey in Syria is highly dependent on how it can address the issue of Syrians living in Turkey, the opposition says.
Turkey hosts some 4 million Syrians and many Turks, battling a major cost-of-living crisis, are becoming increasingly hostile. Kılıçdaroğlu has pledged to create opportunities and the conditions for the voluntary return of Syrians.
“Our approach would be to rehabilitate the Syrian economy and to create the conditions for voluntary returns,” Çeviköz said, adding that this would require an international burden-sharing, but also establishing dialogue with Damascus.
Erdoğan is also trying to establish a rapprochement with Syria but Syrian President Bashar al-Assad says he will only meet the Turkish president when Ankara is ready to completely withdraw its military from northern Syria.
“A new Turkish government will be more eager to essentially shake hands with Assad,” said Ülgen. “But this will remain a thorny issue because there will be conditions attached on the side of Syria to this normalization.”
However, Piccoli from Teneo said voluntary returns of Syrians was “wishful thinking.”
“These are Syrians who have been living in Turkey for more than 10 years, their children have been going to school in Turkey from day one. So, the pledges of sending them back voluntarily, it is very questionable to what extent they can be implemented.”
Greece and the East Med
Turkey has stepped up its aggressive rhetoric against Greece in recent months, with the Erdoğan even warning that a missile could strike Athens.
But the prompt reaction by the Greek government and the Greek community to the recent devastating earthquakes in Turkey and a visit by the Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias created a new backdrop for bilateral relations.
A Turkish drill ship before it leaves for gas exploration | Adem Altan/AFP via Getty Images
Dendias, along with his Turkish counterpart Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, announced that Turkey would vote for Greece in its campaign for a non-permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council for 2025-26 and that Greece would support the Turkish candidacy for the General Secretariat of the International Maritime Organization.
In another sign of a thaw, Greek Defense Minister Nikos Panagiotopoulos and Migration Minister Notis Mitarachi visited Turkey this month, with Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar saying he hoped that the Mediterranean and Aegean would be a “sea of friendship” between the two countries. Akar said he expected a moratorium with Greece in military and airforce exercises in the Aegean Sea between June 15 and September 15.
“Both countries are going to have elections, and probably they will have the elections on the same day. So, this will open a new horizon in front of both countries,” Çeviköz said.
“The rapprochement between Turkey and Greece in their bilateral problems [in the Aegean], will facilitate the coordination in addressing the other problems in the eastern Mediterranean, which is a more multilateral format,” he said. Disputes over maritime borders and energy exploration, for example, are common.
As far as Cyprus is concerned, Çeviköz said that it is important for Athens and Ankara not to intervene into the domestic politics of Cyprus and the “two peoples on the island should be given an opportunity to look at their problems bilaterally.”
However, analysts argue that Greece, Cyprus and the EastMed are fundamental for Turkey’s foreign policy and not much will change with another government. The difference will be more one of style.
“The approach to manage those differences will change very much. So, we will not hear aggressive rhetoric like: ‘We will come over one night,’” said Ülgen. “We’ll go back to a more mature, more diplomatic style of managing differences and disputes.”
“The NATO framework will be important, and the U.S. would have to do more in terms of re-establishing the sense of balance in the Aegean,” said Aydıntaşbaş. But, she argued, “you just cannot normalize your relations with Europe or the U.S., unless you’re willing to take that step with Greece.”
