Are We Living a Moment of Anarchy or Chaos? COVID and AI Exemplify the Difference

The traditional gathering of state leaders at the United Nations was a non-event. The meeting of the world’s largest multilateral organization was overshadowed by the bilateral meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. With a growing distrust of the multilateral system, some have described our current situation as anarchy. Others as chaos. Whichever word you choose, it is a distinction with a difference.

COVID showed the strengths and some weaknesses of an international system built around cooperation among states. Artificial intelligence tests whether that multilateral system can cope with new technology—and whether it is closer to chaos than anarchy.

The concept of anarchy has been an important subject in the study of international relations (IR). Oxford University Professor Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, first published in 1977, was for many years required IR reading. And Alexander Wendt’s “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics” (1992) became one of the canonical IR articles.

What did Bull and Wendt mean by anarchy, and is it relevant today?

Bull’s point was that states exist without a higher authority above them. States are not subject to a central government. The United Nations is not, and has no pretense to be, a world government. It has no authority to legitimately use force in the way that a country’s government can.

But Bull’s starting point is that states without a higher authority do interact in ways that create an international society. States recognize that they have common interests and values and can function together without an overriding government. Bull’s international society is anarchical because it lacks a world government, but it nevertheless functions because it has rules, institutions and a degree of order—at least it did when he first published the book.

Wendt’s article makes a similar point, but from a different perspective. He accepts the absence of a central authority as a structural fact. But what that fact means depends on how states interact with one another. Wendt focuses on how states, through their interaction, construct identities, interests and expectations that give meaning to anarchy. In Wendt’s famous formulation, “anarchy is what states make of it.”

For both Bull and Wendt, then, anarchy does not mean chaos. Although there is no world government, there can still be order. Bull and the English School assume an international society with common values and rules. Wendt assumes state interaction.

The interesting question is what happens when that order begins to break down. What happens when international society falls apart? What happens when states no longer interact to socially construct order?

Chaos theory is usually associated with hard science. The classic example is the “butterfly effect”: a tiny change in the initial conditions of a system can produce a very different outcome over time. A butterfly’s wings do not literally cause a tornado, but in a complex system, small changes can be amplified until their consequences are enormous. The system is not without rules; it is simply no longer reliably predictable.

Chaos is not the same as anarchy. We have lived in an anarchic international system at least since the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which established the inviolability of state sovereignty. What may be changing is the erosion of the institutions, expectations and relationships that allowed states to maintain order. That is when chaos appears.

Are we living today in a world of anarchy or chaos?

The COVID pandemic was anarchic. The international system, through the World Health Organization, had mechanisms to deal with such a crisis. Cooperative state mechanisms were in place. So Wendt’s notion that anarchy is what states make of it closely describes the COVID crisis. States did eventually cooperate, to one extent or another. It was states and a multistate organization that dealt with the crisis.

Is AI potentially anarchical or chaotic? AI cuts across governments, corporations, borders, and technologies. And because there is no international regulatory system for AI, there are now calls for international regulation, monitoring, oversight or cooperation on AI, similar to the WHO’s role in pandemics. It is noteworthy that leaders of major AI companies – Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic – were invited to speak before the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) on September 23.

Altman called for public regulation: “If AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone. They must be shaped through democratic processes and by governments accountable to the people that they serve.” He advocated for international AI standards, rapid incident reporting, and secure channels between governments and private companies for sharing safety information.

The United States, as usual, had a different perspective on regulation: “White House science adviser Michael Kratsios said international institutions should help countries build their own regulatory capacity rather than establish rules above the national level, warning that international dialogue ‘cannot be allowed to drift toward global governance,’” as reported by Arete News.

And after a September 29 meeting with tech executives, Donald Trump reinforced the U.S. position against some form of multilateral governance. Asked why tech leaders should be trusted to self-regulate, Trump replied: “Because they’re outstanding people.”

Switzerland is preparing the Geneva AI Summit 2027, scheduled for 21–22 June. Its theme, “Bridging Innovation and Trust,” is intended to bring together governments, international organizations, academia, business and civil society to begin establishing a formal AI governance structure.

The Swiss Ambassador and Deputy Director of the Swiss Communication Office described the Summit’s aim to a local newspaper: “We don’t want a nice final declaration,” he said. “We would ideally like to lay the foundations for…trust, try to bring some order to this chaos of AI through a certain form of governance, and increase global digital security.”

The difference between COVID and an AI disaster is that COVID fell within the existing state structures and the multilateral WHO system. AI is more complicated because it also involves the private sector. For the moment, there is no equivalent to the WHO. That is why the Geneva Summit and Altman and Amodei appearing before the UNSC are so noteworthy.

COVID exposed the positives and limits of the existing international system. AI may expose the absence of one. With COVID, an international institution already existed when the crisis arrived. With AI, the crisis may arrive before any institution does. Swiss Federal Councillor Albert Rösti has said that the Geneva summit should aim to set out “the minimum regulations in the field of AI.” It may be too late for that. As AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio has warned, “we’re getting close to a world that could be quickly chaotic, dangerous, and very far from our democratic and human rights ideals.”

Anarchy and chaos are distinctions with very pragmatic, practical differences.

Daniel Warner is the author of An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations. (Lynne Rienner). He lives in Geneva.