CFR Surveyed 350 Experts About AI’s Future. Here Are the Takeaways.

The Council on Foreign Relations has polled 350 experts to tell us what everyone with a pulse already knows: AI's winnings are headed for a very small private box, and governance is twiddling its thumbs outside. Sixty-eight percent expect productivity gains to concentrate in advanced economies or a handful of private actors, which is roughly the intellectual effort of watching the last decade unfold and then writing a memo about it. Apparently it takes a survey of 350 brilliant minds to discover that money follows whoever already owns the plumbing.

Then there is the 64 percent who claim the Global South needs 'a fundamental shift in how AI is built' to see meaningful benefit. A fundamental shift—not compute redistribution, not antitrust, not a licensing regime, but a shift, the vaguest noun in the English language, presumably to be summoned into being by goodwill and a whitepaper. And the split on frontier-AI concentration is almost too delicious: 46 percent expect it to stay concentrated by 2035, which means 54 percent expect something else, and both camps are quietly praying the other is wrong.

The true punchline hangs in the URL slug: 'most think governance is failing.' Governance failing! There's the tragic-comic innocence of a man discovering his trousers are aflame. You don't need 350 experts to notice that; you need one semi-conscious citizen watching a single legislative session. But at least we now have metrics: 68 percent concentration, 64 percent demand for a fundamental shift, 46 percent split, zero percent action plan. Perhaps next year's survey will ask the experts how many surveys it takes before anyone actually does something, and one shudders to think of the conference panels between now and then.