The Year in Review – the year in AI policy

In a year of big stories, massive valuations, and bold vendor claims, perhaps 2025’s headline story was the global battle over AI policy, which became deeply political – and dangerously polarised.

The politics begins from the get-go. The Introduction says: “We need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it. To do that, we will continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape, as the Administration has done since Inauguration Day. Simply put, we need to ‘Build, Baby, Build!’”

Why? While AI companies competed for followers’ eyeballs, bloggers’ pixels, and old media’s column inches in 2025, the bigger story was all about AI policy. So, let’s forget that ChatGPT-5 was a damp squib which, far from ushering AGI, revealed a lack of general intelligence in AI’s acolytes, and look at the world’s biggest AI player: the White House.

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