AI theorist, analyst, and technician. IR and political philosophy lecturer. Leftist realpolitik is the aim. Visit @fouadoveisy for my literary work. RT ≠ end.
Joined March 2011
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My chapter, “Toward a Leftist Artificial Intelligence for Geopolitical Analysis,” is published in the new Routledge collection *AI for a Just World: Power, Liberation, and the People Left Behind*.
The chapter lays the theoretical groundwork for the technical project I document on my website. It focuses on the epistemological criteria for such an intervention: how AI learns, the political assumptions it inherits, and what it would mean to train a model to resist reproducing right-wing geopolitical analysis.
routledge.com/AI-for-a-Just-…
"For decades, multilateral trade and investment agreements, such as the WTO’s services agreement, the GATS, committed states to liberalised access for foreign—and above all American—capital. Designed to outlast the governments that signed them, they shielded accumulation from democratic control and secured the predominance of financial capital. I ask what happens to these arrangements as mass AI deployment reorganises capital’s mode of production. By deployment, I mean the integration of AI into the everyday workflows of firms and public institutions. Mass deployment requires capacities no firm can secure alone: a reorganised labour force, new energy and computing infrastructure, and access to foreign resources and markets. States organise this growing codependence through digital sovereignty.
I argue that digital sovereignty reconstitutes multilateralism as a contested, layered field of managed interdependence, through which major powers reorient coordination towards AI deployment and consolidate rival deployment blocs. The transatlantic evidence bears this out. In the EU’s Chips Joint Undertaking, industry has no vote on the productive capacity Europe builds. Private investors are expected to fund most of Europe’s AI gigafactories, yet public authorities must approve changes of ownership or strategic purpose. Washington’s stake in Intel makes giving up control of its foundry costly, and Nvidia’s chip sales to China are licensed only if American customers are supplied first. These instruments now extend into rival multilateral blocs, with the US-led Pax Silica on one side and China’s WAICO on the other."
leftrealpolitik.substack.com…
Fouâd Oveisy retweeted
From a high-pressure belly, your fart might propel you upward and forward.
Come to think of it, that's exactly how your car is powered:
A 700 bar, 600 liter, 3 second, noisy fart 😆
[Hopefully without the methane and the smelly compounds]
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The American Dream now costs $5.3 million as the costs of homeownership and college surge, according to Investopedia.
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International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva warns that AI could change about 40% of jobs worldwide.
While the impact on jobs is slow-moving, it’s still a major shift in the workforce
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Rezaei’s Warnings: How #Iran Sees the Next Phase of the War
🔹Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, made several important remarks today about the Strait of Hormuz, the UAE, possible targets in a renewed war, and negotiations with Washington.
🔹Rezaei accused CENTCOM of using the Emirati military to move oil through the Strait of Hormuz, using small vessels to transfer oil to larger tankers near Oman. He claimed Iran is targeting five or six of these vessels every night.
🔹The interesting point is that Rezaei effectively acknowledges that oil continues to pass through Hormuz, but describes it as “smuggling.” This framing suggests that Tehran is trying to establish that any maritime traffic taking place without its authorization is “illegal” and can therefore be targeted.
🔹In other words, Iran is increasingly treating its control over Hormuz as the authority to determine who can use the strait and under what conditions. The fact that oil is still getting out, from this perspective, does not change Tehran’s claim that it controls and manages the waterway.
🔸Another important aspect is Rezaei’s repeated references to the UAE. He directly accused the Emirati military of helping CENTCOM and warned that the U.S. has valuable assets in the UAE that Iran has so far refrained from targeting.
🔸This is consistent with arguments increasingly heard among pro-government security analysts in Tehran that the UAE should face consequences for helping Washington circumvent Iranian restrictions. Rezaei’s remarks may be preparing the ground for direct Iranian action against Emirati interests if the confrontation escalates.
🔹Rezaei also warned that another war could destroy undersea cables, data centers, and AI infrastructure across the region, which he valued at more than $2 trillion.
🔹This is particularly significant given the discussions in Iran about maximizing economic pressure on the U.S. Beyond disrupting energy supplies and pushing up fuel prices, some Iranian strategists have also been considering the vulnerabilities associated with massive investments in AI and the potential consequences of a collapse in that sector.
🔹Rezaei’s remarks suggest that Iran’s conception of “infrastructure warfare” is expanding beyond oil and gas facilities to include digital and technological infrastructure. In that sense, the threat points to how Tehran is thinking about the next phase of confrontation.
🔸Finally, on diplomacy, Rezaei said Washington had contacted Tehran through Pakistan, Qatar, and Iraq regarding Iran’s seven conditions for resuming negotiations. According to him, the U.S. has accepted some conditions, but not all, and Tehran is still seeking clarification on several points.
🔸He insisted that negotiations would not resume until all seven conditions were accepted.
🔸This reflects Tehran’s apparent assessment that it is under no immediate pressure to reach an agreement. Iranian officials seem to believe that continued disruption in Hormuz and its economic consequences for the U.S. will eventually force Washington to make further concessions.
🔹The repeated threats against the UAE and regional infrastructure also appear intended to reinforce that calculation by reminding Washington that the economic costs of renewed war could extend well beyond energy markets.
🔹The question, however, is whether Tehran is overestimating its ability to sustain this pressure, given the growing economic costs of the confrontation for Iran itself.
"As Canadian public institutions and private firms integrate AI into their daily operations, they rely on a rapidly expanding network of data centres, and Canadian policy has responded by making domestic, sovereign compute a priority. Scholarship has mapped where this infrastructure is located, who owns it, and what land, energy and public money it draws on. Less clear is how control over the invisible hardware and software layers of the AI stack inside these facilities shapes the terms on which Canadian organisations can deploy AI, and therefore what sovereignty over that infrastructure can deliver. This piece addresses that question. It introduces the concept of technical capture to explain how control over these layers translates into institutional and economic dependence during deployment, and it tests the concept against an original census of Canadian data centres. The aim is to show which technical layers constrain sovereignty and where agency can be built."
leftrealpolitik.substack.com…
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BREAKING NEWS
The 2026 #NobelPrize in Literature is awarded to the Canadian author Anne Carson, “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”
Fouâd Oveisy retweeted
“A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute”
…. says the company racing to go public?
We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.
Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.
You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must…
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Bill Gates warns ‘there is no plan’ for the ‘upheaval’ AI will cause cnbc.com/2026/08/26/bill-gat…
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Breaking news: The world's most valuable company reported that data centre revenue, the primary driver of its growth, grew 117% year-on-year. ft.trib.al/0tup6ll
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OpenAI’s Jalapeño AI chip brings new 'threat' to Nvidia margins as custom silicon gains ground cnbc.com/2026/08/26/openai-j…
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I think this is broadly right, but I would add one important qualification. The fact that the UAE had been reviewing its economic exposure to Iran before the missile attacks does not make those attacks irrelevant. A policy can be under consideration for some time and still require a political trigger. The missiles may well have provided that trigger.
I would also be cautious about seeing the decision mainly through the prism of U.S. pressure. There is an Emirati calculation here as well. It became increasingly difficult to sustain a relationship in which Iran continued to benefit from the UAE as a major commercial and financial gateway while, at the same time, treating Emirati security and maritime interests as part of the battlefield.
Iran can certainly reduce its dependence on the UAE. It will find other routes through China, Hong Kong, Türkiye, Iraq, Oman and more opaque financial networks. But finding alternative channels is not the same as replacing the UAE. Few places can replicate the combination of logistics, re-export infrastructure, financial intermediation and access to global markets that the UAE provided.
So, to me, the more interesting question is not whether Iran can adapt — it will — but what that adaptation will cost. Iran may ultimately become less dependent on the UAE, but also more dependent on expensive, fragmented and vulnerable networks at precisely the moment when its economy can least afford it.
Fouâd Oveisy retweeted
OpenAI promised not to retain data from businesses using its AI models while increasing the safety of its products, a bid to snatch customers from rival Anthropic. on.wsj.com/4xesr0A
Fouâd Oveisy retweeted
Told @CNN, it is clear that Vahidi’s mandate is to revise Iranian military strategy in a more assertive and offensive direction.
The current no-war-no-peace situation – with deepening economic problems – may prompt the Iranian leadership to escalate in order to push Trump either to remove the naval blockade or to agree to an arrangement on terms more favorable to Iran.
The Iranian leadership may conclude that the costs of entering another war are lower than the costs of the gradual erosion of its capabilities under the dual pressure of sanctions and the blockade.
edition.cnn.com/2026/08/19/m…
Fouâd Oveisy retweeted
Nvidia, Meta releases are tacit admission that the US moat isn’t holding. bloomberg.com/news/newslette…
I use More Perfect Union in my classrooms, which is why its recent video on data-centre water use caught my attention. It uses The Dalles, Oregon, and El Paso, Texas, as examples of data centres placing extraordinary pressure on local water supplies and communities. However, both examples change substantially once the surrounding political economy is brought back into the frame.
In The Dalles, the video highlights Google’s consumption of nearly 40% of the city’s municipal water. That sounds staggering, given The Dalles has only about 16,000 residents. Across surrounding Wasco County, however, industrial agriculture consumes roughly 28 times as much water as Google. And this is hardly an environmentally or socially neutral baseline: large-scale agriculture entails intensive water extraction and pesticide use, while relying on poorly paid, often migrant agricultural labour.
The El Paso example is even more revealing. The video links Meta’s planned data centre to a water crisis and rising water bills for residents. Meanwhile, the surrounding agricultural sector consumes roughly as much water in a day as the planned Meta data centre would use in a year. Yet it largely disappears from MPU’s account, while the data centre is folded into El Paso’s existing water and utility-cost problems. The chronology matters: the facility is not yet operating, while the increases in residents’ water and electricity bills predate it and have been tied to major system-wide infrastructure, reliability and supply investments. A future data centre may add costs, but that is different from presenting it as the cause of existing shortages and price increases already underway.
These distortions matter. Parts of the left-wing discourse on data centres are becoming ideological in the precise sense that conclusions increasingly precede the facts. This risks reproducing the very kind of post-truth politics the left targets elsewhere.
NEW: Big Tech claims AI data centers don’t use much water.
But data centers typically report the water used inside the facilities — we found them indirectly consuming 10x that amount.
We went to the drought-stricken West, where farmers now have to fight AI oligarchs for water.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
In their video, El Paso Water CEO says Meta's large data center is "a drop in the bucket," adds just 0.4%, and "it's not a big deal."
U.S. data centers (direct+indirect) estimated under 1% of national water use by 2030; agriculture ~40% of withdrawals.
elpasomatters.org/2025/12/02/el-…
blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water…
usgs.gov/water-science-…
Fouâd Oveisy retweeted
Really good/fascinating exchange but… don’t quite buy that this is just a generalized crisis of trust that’s part of a broader souring on tech
Social media yes, but ppl *like* gmail and iPhones (my Taiwanese immigrant mom thinks google and youtube are pure magic bc its knowledge at her fingertips she never imagined possible).
On AI specifically, American labs made it about an abstract race to AGI (something my mom doesn’t care about) while China positioned it as cheap, useful technology that helps ppl build things and do their jobs better right now.
2/2 Second, on the messaging around AI. I do not agree that my messaging has been disproportionately negative. In fact it has been about equally balanced between risks and benefits: I’ve written one major essay about each, and even in interviews where I discuss the risks, I make sure to frequently mention the incredible benefits as well as proposing possible solutions to the risks (short clips from my interviews that end up on social media tend to be disproportionately negative, as that gets clicks). In fact, I wrote Machines of Loving Grace because I didn’t feel the AI industry was painting an inspiring enough picture of how the technology could radically transform the world for the better. The bulk of the essay is devoted to refuting skepticism of AI’s potential in health and biology, and showing why I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years, as crazy as it may sound to ordinary people and frankly to biologists as well (I used to be one!). And, if you read my most recent essay (Policy on the AI Exponential), I discuss concrete proposals for how to streamline the FDA process to make sure the deluge of AI-accelerated drugs isn’t slowed down by the regulatory process. I feel the urgency here: I lost my father to Hepatitis C only a few years before the development of direct-acting antivirals (sofosbuvir), which cure 95% of patients and probably would have cured him.
I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks. I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. The causes of this go back decades and AI is just the latest iteration of it. I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is *actually curing cancer*. I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing.
We are however doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months. When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that. But until then I don’t want to make empty promises, and in the meantime I feel compelled to speak honestly about the very real risks of AI and how to address them. Honesty is the right thing on the merits, and in terms of public credibility and trust it is no worse than, and may in fact be better than, an approach that ignores or distracts from risks which people instinctively understand are real.
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🚨EXCLUSIVE: Military families and service members are now describing horrific conditions across MULTIPLE ships: human waste flooding bathrooms, virtually no food, water or soap, months without port calls, exhausted crews, and no end in sight.
This crisis appears to be far bigger than just the USS Abraham Lincoln. meidasnews.com/news/not-just…
