The Governance Vacuum
No treaty. No floor. No enforceable global standard. A vacuum is not neutrality; it is a decision.
The absence of a rule is a rule. It is the rule that whoever moves first writes the rules later.
There is no global AI treaty. There is no enforceable international floor on frontier model training, deployment, or military use. There is no functioning analog to the IAEA, the WHO, or the nuclear test ban regime. There are voluntary commitments, signed in good faith by some and in bad faith by others, with no inspection regime, no penalties, and no teeth.
This vacuum is sometimes described as neutrality, as a healthy pause before regulation, as a refusal to stifle innovation. It is none of those things. A vacuum, in governance, is a decision. It is the decision to let the entities with the most capital and the least accountability write the operating rules of the next century, retroactively, by precedent.
Treaties are not utopia. They are messy, slow, partial, and routinely violated. They are still, historically, the only instrument that has ever meaningfully constrained civilization-scale technologies. The argument that an AI treaty is impossible is the same argument that was made about nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, ozone-depleting chemicals, and the law of the sea, until it wasn't.
This chapter records the vacuum and refuses to call it peace.