NEW YORK – Eight years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that whoever masters artificial intelligence (AI) “will be the ruler of the world.” Since then, investments in the technology have skyrocketed, with U.S. tech giants (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta) spending more than $320 billion in 2025 alone. Not surprisingly, the race for AI dominance has also generated significant pushback. There are growing concerns about intelligent machines displacing human labor or introducing new safety risks, such as by empowering terrorists, hackers, and other bad actors. And what if AIs were to elude human control altogether, perhaps vanquishing us in their own quest for dominance? But there is a more immediate danger: increasingly powerful but opaque AI algorithms are threatening freedom itself. The more we let machines do our thinking for us, the less capable we will be of meeting the challenges that self-governance presents. The threat to freedom is twofold. On one hand, autocracies like Russia and China are already deploying AI for mass surveillance and increasingly sophistica