The Liberal Dispatch - September 2026 Edition

We have heard it many times before: artificial intelligence is changing almost every aspect of our lives. But increasingly, AI is doing more than changing how we work. It is changing how we communicate with one another, who can intervene in those conversations, how culture is shaped, how political campaigns are won and lost, and even how wars are fought.

Artificial intelligence is therefore no longer simply a technological question. It is a question of power: who possesses it, who shapes it, who benefits from it, and whether individuals, institutions and states retain the agency to determine the conditions under which it is deployed.

The four contributions in this edition of Liberal Dispatch explore that question from remarkably different vantage points.

From South Africa, Solly Malatsi asks perhaps one of the most consequential questions for emerging economies: which technological future do we decline to import? As the United States and China advance their computing capabilities and technological ecosystems, middle and emerging powers must determine how collaboration, investment and domestic capability can strengthen rather than diminish their sovereign agency. Malatsi reminds us that “we are regulating a technology whose trajectory none of us can yet describe”—but also warns against allowing fear of uncertainty to prevent societies from becoming architects of technological change.

From South Korea, Sunghack Lim reveals AI’s democratic paradox. The same technology that can produce deepfakes and weaken citizens’ ability to determine what is true can lower the cost of political participation and give challengers capabilities once reserved for established political machines. Liberals, he argues, need not choose between progress and freedom; we must build institutions capable of sustaining both.

Josef Lentsch takes this transformation inside political organizations themselves. AI is changing where citizens encounter politics while giving smaller movements new capabilities to listen, research, translate, communicate and organize. Yet technology cannot determine what matters. Machine capability must remain anchored in human judgment, responsibility and political purpose.

And from Ukraine comes the most immediate test of this relationship between technological capability and human agency: the battlefield. AI is already transforming warfare, yet Oleksandr Korniyenko argues that even under the extraordinary pressures of national survival, “technology exists to serve humanity”—and human judgment must remain consequential.

Together, these contributions expose a defining tension of the AI era: AI can redistribute capability while simultaneously concentrating power. It can empower citizens, political challengers and smaller economies while strengthening dominant firms, states and technological systems. But what it cannot be allowed to do is undermine the soul of democracy.

Since Liberal International launched its Working Group on Artificial Intelligence in Santiago, our discussions have moved beyond a simple binary of innovation versus regulation. We are confronting questions of human agency, democratic resilience, economic opportunity, cultural autonomy, technological sovereignty and institutional capability. These are ultimately questions about whether technological progress expands or diminishes the freedom, dignity and agency upon which liberal democracy depends.

As the liberal network gathers for Liberal International’s Congress in Bangkok and Taipei, situated within one of the world’s most consequential technological regions, these questions become even more urgent. Our task is not simply to ask what AI will do to liberal democracy. Across regions, economies and political traditions, we must collaborate to determine what liberal democracies intend to do with AI.

Our ambition should not merely be to survive the age of advanced computing, but to ensure that liberal democracy has the agency, capability and confidence to thrive.