Commanding Heights authors warn that frontier AI models could become part of the defense establishment

Farrell Gregory said he and Joe Roberts spent a year writing the book Commanding Heights, published this week. The authors believe that as the cost of training frontier models rises, only one or two states may be able to sustain their own world-class models. They call this a “sovereign frontier” and expect AI labs to come to resemble the defense industrial complex: the best systems may be available to governments for national-security purposes, but not to ordinary users.

Gregory also outlined the “neo-dollar” thesis: if AI agents transact in dollars and dollar-denominated models underpin US technological power, he predicts that other countries could dollarize quickly. He contrasted dollar- and yuan-based financial systems as competing means of financing sovereign frontier-model training. These are the authors’ concepts and forecasts, not descriptions of an already established system.