Anthropic’s ascent to become the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence start-up, with a new funding round catapulting its worth to $965bn and eclipsing OpenAI’s $730bn, underscores the voracious demand for generative AI. Yet this financial milestone arrives at a moment of intensifying regulatory and enforcement backlash against the technology’s darker applications. In Kenya, detectives have arrested a social media user behind viral inflammatory posts that threatened public order, while Indonesia is readying a national AI ethics code and roadmap specifically targeting disinformation. The juxtaposition reveals a double-edged reality: capital is betting massively on AI’s future at the same time as states are scrambling to contain its capacity to erode social cohesion.

The global push against AI-driven falsehoods is swelling into a co-ordinated response. In the Philippines, where supporters of former president Rodrigo Duterte pioneered industrialised online propaganda, cheap generative tools have sparked a new era of ‘slopaganda’—politically weaponised synthetic content that blurs the line between fact and fabrication. Sixty-one privacy regulators across four continents have now pledged joint action against non-consensual AI-generated intimate imagery, a rare alignment that signals deepening international concern. Viewed from Washington and Brussels, this flurry of initiatives reflects a painful recognition that no state can manage the disinformation storm in isolation; the crisis is borderless and demands collective counterweights.

If the information war is the visible skirmish, the economic infrastructure of the AI build-out is generating quieter but consequential frictions. In Michigan, the attorney general is challenging a major data centre project near Ann Arbor over opaque utility contracts and fears that ordinary ratepayers will bear the risk of soaring electricity costs. Such local resistance—coupled with worries about water use and noise—is multiplying, even as industry figures like DigitalBridge’s Marc Ganzi argue that transparency and community partnership can defuse the backlash. Wider still, the sheer scale of investment is stirring macroeconomic unease. Big Tech firms are spending more than $700bn on capital projects this year, a wave of expenditure that, analysts in London note, is now spilling beyond semiconductors into energy supply chains and driving up borrowing costs for households and businesses alike. The inflation risk, which had been tempered last year by weakness in other sectors, is re-emerging as a policy headache.

Beneath these developments, the public conversation around AI is undergoing a fundamental shift. From the United States to Europe, the framing has moved from techno-optimism to an anxious interrogation: in the words of a Guardian report widely cited in Arabic and European media, the question is no longer “what can this technology do?” but “what will it do to us?” Religious and academic authorities have added their voices, warning that the speed of integration into work, media and education outstrips institutional comprehension. This swelling sense of an uncontrolled force leaves policymakers with a profound dilemma: how to preserve the economic momentum that generates record valuations without forfeiting the social licence on which the industry’s long-term viability depends. The tension is unlikely to resolve soon, and the very tools that drive the boom are, with exquisite irony, those that most efficiently erode the public trust required to sustain it.