This report is intended to stimulate thinking among policymakers about possible impacts of the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) on geopolitics and the world order by highlighting potential future scenarios for AGI's governance and its effects on global power dynamics. In this report, the authors focus on a variety of impacts — some of which are perhaps unlikely but significant — arising from AGI's development and deployment that could fundamentally alter the existing geopolitical order. To drive thinking about these potential world-changing impacts, the authors develop eight illustrative scenarios based on the extent of centralization of AGI development and its geopolitical outcomes. These scenarios cover AGI impacts that empower the United States, that empower U.S. competitors, that cause a significant geopolitical shift, and that result in an interruption in the development of AGI. These scenarios are designed to demonstrate how the extent of centralization in AGI development is a crucial determinant of the geopolitical outcomes that might materialize. In more-centralized scenarios, either the United States or an adversary could gain significant advantages, whereas decentralized development might lead to a multilateral governance model or even geopolitical destabilization if nonstate actors become significantly more powerful because of the development of AGI.

This report documents Coupled Competition, a game that was developed for a broader project on U.S.-China economic competition. Coupled Competition explores the U.S.-China relationship and whether it can be managed to prevent the relationship's competitive dimensions from overshadowing opportunities for mutual gain and security. This game is one of two games that are intended to represent different perspectives on how the international system works or what basic principles drive the global order. In this report, the authors provide information on the game's design, the results of two playtests, and suggestions for future elaboration and use of this game. The playtests incorporated two models of each side's information about the other. In one case, each side had perfect information about the other, while in the second case, that information was distorted with random errors. Although the results were creatively similar, systemic stability was more fragile, and both sides invested considerably more in security in the second playtest compared with the first. Further development of Coupled Competition could explore the effects of imperfect information, introduce exogenous events, and constrain players to operate within the limits of a specific strategy. This report is the fourth of a four-part series in which RAND researchers considered different aspects of U.S.-China economic competition. Part 1 presents economic and institutional analyses of U.S.-China economic competition. Part 2 presents the results of a participatory foresight exercise to understand the long-term path for ensuring U.S. economic health. Part 3 describe another economic competition game that explores the dynamics of multiple countries trying to ensure their own economic health.