AI weather predictions are in vogue, and the skies look like they are darkening. OpenAI’s eagerly awaited GPT-5 received a muted response. Valuations are sky high, and overall AI investment plans keep surging into the billions and trillions. On the prediction market Manifold Markets, someone recently put up a question on whether there will be an AI winter at the end of 2025.
But the current collective answer seems to be no. The prediction trades at a 1.1% chance.
AI is here to stay, and no short-term autumn chill can stop it from producing profound change. It might be helpful to remind ourselves of a distinction that is often lost in another field: environmental policy. Climate change experts distinguish between weather and climate — where the daily weather may fluctuate, but the overall shift in the climate emerges more slowly over time. A cold summer day does not provide evidence of a lowering of the average temperature of the planet.
We are moving from a world in which we think about AI as a quick shift in weather to one in which we need to, and have time to, prepare for a changing climate. AI will impact jobs, security, education, science, and almost every other field of society over time. In regulatory terms, this means taking a long view. Regulations must avoid trying to legislate for a shift in the weather.
Climate change experts built an ingenious model dividing climate change into different changes in the temperature: this is what it will look like if the Earth becomes on average one degree Celsius hotter, and what if two or three degrees.
An AI capabilities report should take the same approach. Instead of temperature, we should look at things like percentage of jobs displaced, the length of autonomous tasks AI can perform, and the percentage of benchmarks that change over time.
These metrics outline a space of possibilities crucial to explore for policymakers. Just as with temperature, we can then choose to impose ambitions at the pace of change — and try to stay below a certain percentage of jobs displaced within a certain timeframe, to take just one example.
Now, you may protest, we have much more influence over technological change than over climate change, and the idea that we should try to forecast the AI transformation may seem wrong, or even offensive. Such models seem to be infused with technical determinism.
But maybe we have more influence over technology than we do over the way the climate changes? Or are these both examples of complex systems that evolve as a result of our collective choices over time scales that measure in decades and centuries rather than in days?
We have more influence over technological weather — the short-term uses of technology, the design today of systems, and the behaviors of tech companies — than we do over regular weather. But it does not follow automatically that the evolving technological climate is ours to choose.
When a technology becomes a geopolitical hinge, it becomes hard for any single political constituency to affect its long-term trajectory — not impossible, but hard — and if we assume this is the case, we would do well to prepare for a spectrum of scenarios.
A long-term observatory for artificial intelligence is needed, tasked with exploring different scenarios, key dimensions of change, and possible policy options. We might be heading for some dreary autumn AI weather. But we should prepare for a deep technological climate shift.
Nicklas Berild Lundblad is a Senior Fellow with the Tech Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis. Nicklas is a writer, researcher, and public policy expert with 20 years of experience leading, building, and developing policy functions at companies like Google, Stripe, and now DeepMind. His interests include technology, politics, philosophy, and science.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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