Published September 11, 2026 by Nick Jennings, vice-chancellor and president of Loughborough University, this essay argues the more pressing challenge is no longer building intelligent individual AI systems but governing ‘artificial societies’ — large-scale networks of millions of autonomous AI agents that cooperate, compete and interact with one another. Jennings contends managing these emergent collective systems is harder than developing any single intelligent agent, and calls for governance and institutional frameworks to ensure safety, fairness and accountability at societal scale.
