Swati Srivastava | AI and Corporate World Order

by Reimagining World Order

Colloquium/Symposium Social Sciences

Thu, Feb 19, 2026

4:30 PM – 6 PM EST (GMT-5)

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Julis Romo Rabinowitz Building A01

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

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This talk focuses on a corporate world order where AI concentrates material resources in a few select corporations while enabling Big Tech firms to shape societal ideas about AI. Over the past decade, firms such as Google, Microsoft, and Meta have invested heavily in AI, while OpenAI, Anthropic, and NVIDIA have exploded in value. To understand corporate ordering dynamics, the talk overviews material concentrations in the “AI stack,” historicizing the recent dominance of industry vis-à-vis academia in AI model development and tracing the ways that Big Tech pursues acquisitions and partnerships with startups. Ordering also entails dominant ideas, and the analysis focuses on three narratives promoted by AI firms: the need for governments to pursue “sovereign AI”; artificial general intelligence and existential risk; and corporations as digital defenders. Firms vary in their views on these narratives, but collectively the AI industry pushes for a central role in global order-making.

Where

Julis Romo Rabinowitz Building A01

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

Speakers

John Ikenberry's profile photo

John Ikenberry

Director

Reimaging World Order

G. John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.  He is also Co-Director of Princeton’s Center for International Security Studies. Ikenberry is also a Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea. In 2018-19, Ikenberry was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University. In 2013-2014 Ikenberry was the 72nd Eastman Visiting Professor at Balliol College, Oxford. Ikenberry is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In a recent survey of international relations scholars, Ikenberry was ranked in the top 10 in scholars who have produced the best work in the field of IR in the past 20 years, and ranked in the top 8 in scholars who have produced the most interesting work in the past 5 years.



Professor Ikenberry is the author of eight books, mostly recently A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order (Yale 2020), and  Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American System (Princeton, 2011). His book, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, 2001), won the 2002 Schroeder-Jervis Award presented by the American Political Science Association for the best book in international history and politics. A collection of his essays, entitled Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition: American Power and International Order (Policy) appeared in 2006. Ikenberry is also co-author of Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the 21st Century (Princeton 2009), which explores the Wilsonian legacy in contemporary American foreign policy. Ikenberry has also the editor or co-editor of fourteen books, including America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power (Cornell, 2002), The End of the West? Crisis and Change in Atlantic Order (Cornell 2008) and Unipolarity and International Relations Theory (Cambridge, 2011).  Ikenberry has authored 130 journal articles, essays, and book chapters.



Professor Ikenberry is the co-director of the Princeton Project on National Security, and he is the co-author, along with Anne-Marie Slaughter, of the final report, Forging a World of Liberty Under Law.  Among his many activities, Professor Ikenberry served as a member of the Policy Planning Staff in 1991-92, as a member of an advisory group at the State Department in 2003-04, and as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on U.S.-European relations, the so-called Kissinger-Summers commission. He is also a reviewer of books on political and legal affairs for Foreign Affairs.

Swati Srivastava's profile photo

Swati Srivastava

Associate Professor of Political Science

Purdue University

Hosted By

Reimagining World Order | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Reimagining World Order (OWNER)

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