The article rejects UN Secretary-General Guterres’s call for an international AI safety framework, arguing that central planning cannot manage a rapidly evolving technology because of the knowledge problem identified by Mises and Hayek: essential information is local, tacit, and dispersed, not collectible by panels or treaties.

It treats AI as capital rather than an existential agent, notes that governments already integrate AI into surveillance and security systems, and cites the WHO’s pandemic response as evidence that international institutions are structurally unsuited to oversee fast-moving crises.

With specialized AI infrastructure concentrated in only 32 countries, demands for “AI sovereignty” from non-producing states are portrayed as requests to regulate an industry they do not host, while genuine risk management is said to belong to entrepreneurs who can fail cheaply through market feedback rather than to permanent bureaucracies.

This week in New York, under the banner “Restoring trust, managing transformation,” the world’s diplomats convened for the 81st UN General Assembly and decided, somewhere between the wars and the climate panic, that artificial intelligence now belongs on the short list of things only they can save us from. Secretary-General António Guterres devoted much of his valedictory address to a warning about runaway AI, one of three existential threats he identified alongside climate change and inequality, and he told the world that voluntary, uneven national safeguards would not be enough: only an international framework, he insisted, could stop a race to the bottom on AI safety.

Weeks earlier, an Independent International Scientific Panel he had convened warned that computing power and technical talent were already dangerously concentrated in a handful of companies and countries. Washington, for its part, spent the same week trying to rename the whole technology “Superior Intelligence,” its own category error, but one that at least stops short of pretending the world needs a treaty to manage what it intends to out-race rather than tame.

He is not wrong that something remarkable is happening to the world’s most important new technology. He is wrong—in the oldest and most predictable way a planner can be wrong—about who is equipped to manage it.

Austrian economists have a name for that mistake, and it did not take a supercomputer to discover it: the knowledge problem. Ludwig von Mises showed that, without market prices for the factors of production, no planning body, however well staffed with independent scientific panels, can rationally compare alternative uses of scarce resources. Friedrich Hayek also argued that the knowledge an economy actually runs on is not the kind you can collect in a UN report. It is local, tacit, and constantly shifting, scattered across millions........

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