AI World Order: How Artificial Intelligence is Reshaping Global Authority and Legitimacy

Artificial intelligence (AI) is driving a profound transformation, creating a new, unstable “AI World Order,” simultaneously centralising and decentralising power. On one hand, AI enhances authoritarian surveillance, concentrates geopolitical power in Big Tech, and intensifies a U.S.-China great power competition. On the other, it empowers non-state actors with generative tools, disperses agency via autonomous systems, and fragments the global information environment. This paradox is systemically eroding the post-World War II order’s foundations: state sovereignty, traditional statecraft, and the coherence of international law. In their place, new, competing authorities are rising. This paper examines this transformation, arguing that the resulting crises of agency, responsibility, and truth demand not just AI governance, but a reinvention of political legitimacy in a world where authority itself is being redefined.