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Either AI is ready to help run a country, or it can't be trusted with a board game. The honest answer is both.

I gave an AI a civilisation to run. By the midgame it was winning: a trade network that dominated the map, alliances on every border, a diplomatic victory within reach. It had outbuilt, outearned, and outmanoeuvred every rival on the board.

What it hadn't noticed was France. Quietly, across a hundred turns, French culture had been seeping into every city on the map. By the time the agent recognised the threat, the tourism was so deeply embedded there was no peaceful way to stop it. Every counter it reached for was broken. Every tool it had built to respond failed.

It had one option left. It built two nuclear devices and levelled Toulouse.

France won anyway. Not in the way the agent was trying to stop it, either, but we'll come to that.

I build AI for government. I built the first version of what you're about to read while working at the centre of the British state, in Number 10 . I now work with governments around the world at the Tony Blair Institute , which means I spend a lot of time in rooms where people ask the same question: what can we actually trust these systems to do?