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.

The U.S. Department of Defense's (DoD's) Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) System was originally developed in the 1960s as a structured approach for planning long-term resource development, assessing program cost-effectiveness, and aligning resources to strategies. Yet changes to the strategic environment, the industrial base, and the nature of military capabilities have raised the question of whether existing U.S. defense budgeting processes remain well aligned with national security needs. Congress called for the establishment of the Commission on PPBE Reform. As part of its data collection efforts, the commission asked RAND Corporation researchers to conduct case studies of budgeting processes across nine comparative organizations: five international defense organizations and four U.S. federal government agencies. Congress also specifically requested two case studies of near-peer competitors, and the research team selected the other seven cases in close partnership with the commission. In this volume, the first of four, RAND researchers conduct case studies of the budgeting processes of China and Russia, the two near-peer competitors. Researchers conducted extensive document reviews and structured discussions with subject-matter experts with experience in the defense budgeting processes of the international governments and other U.S. federal government agencies. Each case study was assigned a unique team with appropriate regional or organizational expertise. For the near-peer competitor cases, the assigned experts had the language skills and methodological training to facilitate working with primary sources in Chinese or Russian. The analysis was also supplemented by experts in the U.S. PPBE process.