George Osborne getting a new job isn’t exactly news. Since leaving frontline politics, the former chancellor has served as the chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, edited (not entirely successfully) the Evening Standard, advised asset manager BlackRock, joined boutique advisory firm Robey Warshaw, been appointed as the chair of the British Museum and taken on roles including advising crypto firm Coinbase. Oh, and like any white man of a particular age, he co-hosts a political podcast.
But Osborne’s latest job is the most eye-opening – and is an alarming augur of what is to come. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has become the latest organisation to employ Osborne. He will run OpenAI for Countries, a unit tasked with working directly with governments while expanding the company’s Stargate datacentre programme beyond the US. At least it was announced with a tweet, rather than a LinkedIn post.
The tweet prompted jokes, as did Osborne’s single-handed attempt to boost laggard employment figures brought about by his policies as the chancellor of austerity. But it’s a serious moment, because it’s another sign that the biggest AI firms are starting to behave less like normal companies and more like quasi-governments. They’re negotiating “national” partnerships, pitching a values-led vision of “democratic AI” and hiring former senior politicians as their diplomatic corps. It’s a similar path we have seen from other industries, including oil, pharma and defence, in previous decades – which is why it’s important to try to recognise the risks and head them off before AI companies can repeat the same trick.
The initiative Osborne is heading up, OpenAI for Countries, does what it says on the tin. It’s designed to embed OpenAI’s models and infrastructure inside the machinery of states, becoming an invaluable, indefatigable part of the running of our lives. OpenAI is in talks with about 50 countries to provide them with critical national infrastructure. Whether you welcome Osborne being put in that role rather than a tech executive is a little like Hobson’s choice: who do you distrust the least? But it’s an indication of how tech companies see their position in society that they are hiring such high-powered people for these roles.
Osborne is not the first to don the branded hoodie and Silicon Valley lifestyle. His fellow coalition government bod Nick Clegg blazed the trail as head of global affairs for Meta. At the time of his initial hiring as a vice-president at Facebook in 2018, his appointment was treated as a PR move – a big name to help the company navigate scandal and scrutiny. But it hinted that platforms had become political actors, whether they liked it or not. The industry’s outsized spending on lobbyists (€151m in Europe alone at the last count) to support the political beasts is an indication of what is at stake. The numbers involved also hint at the scale of the prize that tech companies see: the 10 largest big tech firms now outspend the biggest 10 companies in the pharma, finance and automotive industries combined.
The former chancellor isn’t even the first former controller of the UK public purse to be handy to big tech. In October of this year, Rishi Sunak took advisory roles with Microsoft and the AI firm Anthropic, less than two years after he convened the AI safety summit at Bletchley Park. Sunak, at least, already had the regulation hoodie in his wardrobe.
You can read these moves in two ways. The generous interpretation is that these companies are hedging: trying to anticipate tech regulation and ensure they understand it. The more cynical interpretation is that they are attempting to shape the geopolitical story around AI from inside the machine, hiring former leaders less for their technical insight than their institutional muscle memory and networks.
Either way, it leaves democracies with a problem. Governments are supposed to set the rules of the road. But the tech companies they are meant to regulate are on a different scale, planting their feet in different countries. When Sunak convened the Bletchley Park summit, it was notable that he turned interviewer to quiz Elon Musk, sitting starry-eyed on stage as Musk dominated the discourse.
It’s time to recognise these companies are acting like political actors. That means it’s time to treat them like political actors, too. We need more transparency: governments signing up to OpenAI for Countries agreements should publish the details of their partnerships by default. We should also ask more questions about infrastructure dependence. Governments love Stargate-style investments in their countries, and want to be able to don a hard hat, cut a ribbon and issue a press release. But if they are in effect a new layer of national backbone, they should be studied more closely – as if they are utilities, rather than receive the good grace of a startup-style mystique.
The more tech companies start to act like politicians and global leaders, the more we need to treat them like it. That doesn’t mean deference; it means more scepticism and journalistic interrogation.
Chris Stokel-Walker is the author of TikTok Boom: The Inside Story of the World’s Favourite App
