The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma

Mustafa Suleyman co-founded DeepMind, sold it to Google, and later co-founded Inflection AI before becoming CEO of Microsoft AI — making him one of the most consequential figures in the development of artificial intelligence. The Coming Wave is his account of why the convergence of AI and synthetic biology represents the most significant technological transition in human history, and why the question of how to govern that transition is the defining challenge of the coming decades.

The book's relevance to the information environment is direct and substantial. Suleyman devotes significant attention to the information manipulation capabilities that advanced AI will enable — not merely deepfakes and synthetic media, but the ability to generate personalised disinformation at scale, to conduct influence operations with unprecedented efficiency, and to undermine the epistemic foundations of democratic governance in ways that current counter-disinformation frameworks are entirely unprepared for. For practitioners seeking to understand the trajectory of the threat landscape over the next decade, The Coming Wave is essential reading — both for its analysis of specific risks and for its broader argument about why containment of these technologies may prove more difficult than the field currently assumes.