# How to Confront the Threat of AI Dictatorship

> Source: <https://techpolicy.press/how-to-confront-the-threat-of-ai-dictatorship>
> Published: 2026-05-10 13:15:00+00:00

Is the future something to be calculated and controlled, or something we shape together through democratic struggle? How should we read the convergence of Silicon Valley's "Dark Enlightenment" thinkers with a resurgent authoritarian right, and is Europe truly reckoning with what has shifted in the United States? What is driving the continent's anti-regulatory mood? What counts as "evidence" sufficient to legislate a fast-moving technology, and at what point does the demand for proof become a license for the catastrophe to arrive first?

**Justin Hendrix** addressed these questions and more with scholar and former European Commission official **Paul Nemitz**, who is one of the authors of a new book titled * The Open Future and its Enemies: How We Can Protect Free Society from AI Dictatorship. *The book argues that three decades of under-regulation have produced the concentrations of wealth and power we now confront, and that the survival of democracy in the digital age will depend on citizens, civil society, and a new generation willing to treat their work as carrying responsibility not just for safety, but for fundamental rights and self-government.