2025 Reports

The Age of Pre-Emptive Power: AI, Anticipatory Influence, and the New Face of Power

Tumin, Zachary; Edelmann, Rasmus

Artificial intelligence is changing not only what institutions can do, but how power itself is organized and exercised. This issues paper argues that contemporary AI systems are giving rise to a fourth face of power – what we call pre-emptive power – by embedding anticipatory capabilities into the infrastructures of finance, health, security, and everyday life.

Building on classic work by Robert Dahl, Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, and Steven Lukes on the three faces of power, we show how AI alters the conditions under which decisions are taken, agendas are set, and preferences are formed. AI systems that perceive patterns in vast data streams, maintain live maps of changing environments, forecast outcomes, and prescribe interventions begin to act on the future before conventional decision points come into view.

We describe these capabilities in terms of six “supercognitive engines” of AI – pattern-making, entity recognition, dynamic mapping, optimization, personalization, and generative synthesis – and propose that, when organized and legitimized through socio-technical architectures, they generate anticipatory influence and, ultimately, pre-emptive power. Drawing on insights from Susan Strange’s account of structural power, Russell Hardin’s work on coordination and collective action, Donella Meadows’s analysis of leverage points in complex systems, Clayton Christensen’s notion of theory as methodology, and Thomas Davenport’s work on analytics and AI in management, we sketch a framework for analyzing this new terrain.

Our aim is to offer a conceptual roadmap for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners who must make sense of AI-enabled power in domains as varied as financial markets, healthcare, public safety, and geopolitics, and to support further debate on how pre-emptive power should be governed.

Keywords: artificial intelligence; power; pre-emptive power; anticipatory influence; infrastructures of anticipation; institutional design; geopolitics