In the first of two parts, Robin Brown and Gregory Andrews examine why AI, climate change, pandemics and online markets repeatedly outrun national regulation, and what existing arms-control and international regimes can teach us about governing risks that cross borders.

Anthropic chief Dario Amodei warned in September that, within a year, a swarm of AI agents could be capable of taking over large parts of the internet. Commentators asked what many have since Hiroshima: can the world regulate this the way it has nuclear weapons? Alan Kohler put the uncomfortable answer plainly: probably not, the reason being structural, not technical. It is a problem of sovereignty.

Whether the harm arrives as greenhouse gas emissions, an algorithm, a parcel or a pathogen, the underlying regulatory challenge is much the same: what happens at the point where a sovereign state’s formal rule-making runs out and the problem of transnational coordination takes over.

Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons are unusual cases where international regulation has achieved substantial, though uneven, success. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) did not eliminate the underlying technologies, all of which are profoundly dual use. Instead, they drew legal lines around particular purposes, weapons and activities, while preserving peaceful uses. The NPT couples non-proliferation with safeguards against diversion of nuclear material; the CWC distinguishes prohibited weapons purposes from legitimate industrial, medical and other uses; and the BWC prohibits agents and toxins where their type or quantity cannot be justified for peaceful or protective purposes. International law did not ban the science. It defined what states could not do with it and, where possible, created ways of verifying compliance.

Climate change and AI are different, but also similar to each other. The combustion that warms the planet is the same combustion that has built the global economy; the capability that might one day........

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