Program IV

Governance & Diplomacy

Boards · multilateral institutions · Track II dialogue

Selected publications

Horizon Scan 002

AI Governance

Horizon Search Institute · September 2026 · Revised 5 October 2026

How infrastructure, standards, procurement, insurance, and existing law shape AI governance across seven major regimes.

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Searchlight 022

The AI Capex Boom: From Hyperscaler Debt to Systemic Risk

Samuel Marson · August 28, 2026

Quarterly earnings have laid bare the scale of the AI investment boom. As hyperscalers spend ever more on infrastructure and turn increasingly to debt, the risks are spreading into credit markets and institutional portfolios. If AI returns fall short, a Big Tech correction could become a wider financial-system shock.

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Bank of England AI correction scenario. Inputs: a 45 percent fall in US equities over six quarters, a 350 basis point widening in corporate credit spreads and a sustained depreciation of the US dollar. Modelled peak UK GDP impact is minus 2.2 percent relative to baseline. Credit spreads account for 50 percent of that impact, equity markets 36 percent, and all other channels the remaining 14 percent.
Figures from the Bank of England’s July 2026 Financial Stability Report. The scenario models a sharp reassessment of expected AI productivity and profitability, beginning in the US and feeding through to global financial markets. It assumes a 45% fall in US equities over six quarters, a 350 basis point widening in corporate credit spreads and a sustained depreciation of the US dollar. The channel shares are the Bank’s decomposition of the UK impact; the residual covers all remaining transmission channels. Source: Bank of England, Financial Stability Report, July 2026. Read Searchlight 022 →

Research in progress and program context

The HSI Salons (New York, June 2026; London, October 2026; Tokyo, in development for 2027) function as Track II convenings on cross-jurisdictional governance. A cross-jurisdiction AI regulation database covering scored instruments across North America, Europe, and Asia is in production. Strategic Council research notes on multilateral governance design are forthcoming.

Initiative

The Cross-Border Governance of the AI Labor Transition

The AI workforce transition is being answered nationally. In the United States, employer-led coalitions are mobilizing serious capital to retrain workers at home. What no domestic effort is built to govern is the layer above it, the movement of the shift through global labor markets, migration, education standards, and the arrangements between states. That layer is a governance and diplomacy problem, and it is currently unowned. This initiative studies how governments and institutions coordinate across borders on a transition none of them can manage alone.

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Image credits
Governance & Diplomacy
General view of a meeting during European Commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas’s visit to Germany, Berlin, September 22, 2026. Photo: Kyriakos Samartzidis / European Commission. © European Union, 2026, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Cropped and resized for web presentation.