Is AI Good For Democracy? The Arms Race Between Citizens and Governments
Politicians fixate on the global race for technological supremacy between the US and China. They debate the geopolitical implications of chip exports, the latest model releases from each country, and the military applications of artificial intelligence. Someday, they believe, we might see advancements in AI tip the scales in a superpower conflict.
But the most important arms race of the 21st century is already happening elsewhere and, while AI is definitely the weapon of choice, the combatants are distributed across dozens of domains. Academic journals are flooded with AI-generated papers and are turning to AI to help review submissions. Brazil’s court system started using AI to triage cases, only to face an increasing volume of cases filed with AI help. Open source software developers are being overwhelmed with code contributions from bots. Newspapers, music, social media, education, investigative journalism, hiring, and procurement are all being disrupted by a massive expansion of AI use.
Each of these is an arms race. Adversaries within a system iteratively seek and engage against their competition by continuously expanding their use of a common technology. And in this arms race of technology adoption, US mega-corporations gain on all sides. Lessening this concentration of power is what’s critical.
The Democracy Arms Race
To understand these arms races, let’s look at an example of particular interest to democracies worldwide: how AI is changing the relationship between democratic government and citizens. Interactions that used to happen between people and elected representatives are expanding to a massive scale, with AIs taking the roles that humans once did.
In a notorious example from 2017, the US Federal Communications Commission opened a comment platform on the web to get public input on internet regulation. It was quickly flooded with millions of comments fraudulently orchestrated by broadband providers to oppose FCC regulation of their industry. From the other side, a 19-year-old college student responded by submitting millions of comments of his own supporting the regulation. Both sides were using software primitive by the standards of today’s AI.
Nearly a decade later, it is getting harder for citizens to tell when they’re talking to a government bot, or when an online conversation about public policy is just bots talking to bots. When constituents leverage AI to communicate better, faster, and more, it pressures government officials to do the same.
The New Reality
This may sound futuristic, but it’s become a familiar reality in the US. Staff in the US Congress are using AI to make their constituent email correspondence more efficient. Politicians campaigning for office are adopting AI tools to automate fundraising and voter outreach. By one 2025 estimate, a fifth of public submissions to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were already being generated with AI assistance.
People and organizations are adopting AI here because it solves a real problem that has made mass advocacy campaigns ineffective in the past: quantity has been inversely proportional to both quality and relevance. It’s easy for government agencies to dismiss general comments in favour of more specific and actionable ones. That makes it hard for regular people to make their voices heard. Most of us don’t have the time to learn the specifics or to express ourselves in this kind of detail. AI makes that contextualization and personalization easy. And as the volume and length of constituent comments grow, agencies turn to AI to facilitate review and response.
The Inevitable Dynamic
That’s the arms race. People are using AI to submit comments, which requires those on the receiving end to use AI to wade through the comments received. To the extent that one side does attain an advantage, it will likely be temporary. And yet, there is real harm created when one side exploits another in these adversarial systems.
Constituents of democracies lose out if their public servants use AI-generated responses to ignore and dismiss their voices rather than to listen to and include them. Scientific enterprise is weakened if fraudulent papers sloppily generated by AI overwhelm legitimate research. The very fabric of democratic discourse is threatened when citizens cannot distinguish genuine human engagement from automated manipulation.
As the authors write in their new book, Rewiring Democracy, the arms race dynamic is inevitable. Every actor in an adversarial system is incentivized and, in the absence of new regulation in this fast-moving space, free to use new technologies to advance its own interests. Yet some of these examples are heartening. They signal that, even if you face an AI being used against you, there’s an opportunity to use the tech for your own benefit.
The Real Winners
But, right now, it’s obvious who is benefiting most from AI. A handful of American Big Tech corporations and their owners are extracting trillions of dollars from the manufacture of AI chips, the development of AI data centres, and the operation of so-called ‘frontier’ AI models. Regardless of which side pulls ahead in each arms race scenario, the house always wins. Corporate AI giants profit from the race dynamic itself.
This is the deeper problem. While we focus on the competition between citizens and governments, or between political factions, the real power is accumulating elsewhere. The platforms that enable both sides are owned by a tiny elite. The infrastructure that supports the entire system is controlled by a few corporations. The wealth generated by the AI revolution is flowing to a handful of beneficiaries.
In this sense, the arms race is not a zero-sum game between citizens and governments, but a positive-sum game for the tech giants who supply weapons to both sides. They win regardless of who wins.
Fighting Back
As formidable as the near-monopoly positions of today’s Big Tech giants may seem, people and governments have substantial capability to fight back. Various democracies are resisting this concentration of wealth and power with tools of antitrust regulation, protections for human rights, and public alternatives to corporate AI.
Antitrust enforcement can break up monopolies and restore competition. Human rights protections can ensure that AI systems respect fundamental freedoms rather than undermining them. Public alternatives to corporate AI—government-funded models, open-source initiatives, cooperative platforms—can provide options that are not beholden to shareholder value.
All of us worried about the AI arms race and committed to preserving the interests of our communities and our democracies should think in both these terms: how to use the technology to our own advantage, and how to resist the concentration of power AI is being exploited to create.
Conclusion: A Choice, Not a Destiny
The relationship between AI and democracy is not predetermined. It will be shaped by the choices we make—as citizens, as governments, as societies. AI can be a tool for democratic empowerment, amplifying citizen voices and making government more responsive. Or it can be a tool for manipulation, control, and concentration of power.
The arms race dynamic is real, but it is not inevitable that the house always wins. We have the power to regulate, to build alternatives, and to resist. The question is whether we will exercise that power before it is too late.
Q&A: Unpacking AI and Democracy
Q1: What is the “arms race” dynamic in AI and democracy?
The arms race refers to the iterative escalation between citizens and governments in their use of AI. Citizens use AI to generate more sophisticated, personalized communications to influence policy. Governments respond by using AI to process the increased volume and to generate responses. This creates a feedback loop where each side’s adoption of AI pressures the other to do the same. The dynamic extends across many domains—academia, courts, software development—where adversarial actors use AI to gain advantage.
Q2: How is AI already being used in democratic processes?
Examples abound. In the US, Congressional staff use AI to manage constituent email more efficiently. Politicians use AI to automate fundraising and voter outreach. By 2025, an estimated one-fifth of submissions to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were AI-generated. The 2017 FCC comment process saw millions of fraudulent comments orchestrated by both broadband providers and a student activist. These are early examples of what is rapidly becoming normal.
Q3: What are the dangers of this arms race for democracy?
The core danger is that genuine citizen voices get lost in the noise. When public servants use AI to generate dismissive responses rather than to listen, democratic accountability suffers. More broadly, citizens lose trust when they cannot distinguish genuine human engagement from automated manipulation. The scientific enterprise is weakened by AI-generated fraudulent papers. The very fabric of democratic discourse is threatened when bots talking to bots replace human conversation.
Q4: Who benefits most from this arms race?
The primary beneficiaries are American Big Tech corporations. Regardless of which side wins in any particular adversarial context, the companies that supply AI chips, build data centres, and operate frontier models profit. They extract trillions of dollars from the infrastructure of the arms race itself. This concentration of wealth and power is the deeper problem underlying the more visible competition between citizens and governments.
Q5: How can democracies fight back against AI-driven concentration of power?
Three tools are available. First, antitrust regulation can break up monopolies and restore competition. Second, human rights protections can ensure AI systems respect fundamental freedoms. Third, public alternatives to corporate AI—government-funded models, open-source initiatives, cooperative platforms—can provide options not beholden to shareholder value. The combination of using AI for democratic empowerment while resisting its concentration of power offers a path forward.
