States are building walls and bridges simultaneously. With every innovation comes a choice: To share, and thus to collaborate and both increase potential gains with allies but also to increase security risks, or to lock the innovation down, thus keeping it safe from bad actors but also to limit its potential. This question demands a balance that can only be struck with explicit reasoning about what is at stake.
Mark Daley, chief AI officer at Western University, presents a realist account of what might be called “knowledge statecraft”: the purposeful design of knowledge flows (for example, research collaboration, data and computation access) to shape the distribution of capabilities and bargaining leverage, positing that aggregation (alliance filtering, preferential openness) and constraint (export controls, screening) are the two complementary logics of innovation diplomacy. Verification capacity, such as audits, secure enclaves, credible sanctions, is the hinge variable in this equation, and Daley calls for audit protocols and credible sanctions to be a strategic priority.
