When the 2026 Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group convened in Bangkok from Oct. 12 to 18, most headlines focused on wars, supply chains, and sovereign debt. But buried in one document, the chair’s statement of the 54th meeting of the International Monetary and Financial Committee, issued on Oct. 17,  was what may prove to be a defining moment in the evolving relationship among technology, money, and power.

Before reading that statement, it helps to remember a simple truth about international documents: they are not written to describe reality. They are written to build the framework within which reality will be managed for years to come. 

Behind the scenes in Bangkok, a war over terminology played out, and it was never technical. It was political and philosophical.

Three terms competed to describe the same phenomenon. First, the term “super intelligence,”  as emphasized by Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh, who attended the IMFC as the alternate for the US treasury secretary. The term is derived directly from Executive Order 14434, signed by President Donald Trump, titled “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence.”

It carries an implicit acknowledgment of American technological dominance and emphasizes the productivity and investment shock associated with the technology. It is a word of power and primacy.

Second, the term “non-human intellect,” adopted by IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva. It is a philosophical, existential term that carries an ethical worry, namely what happens when machine cognition becomes independent of human control?

Third, the term “advanced intelligence technologies,” which the committee ultimately adopted. It appears exactly five times in the official text, and it is a neutral, technocratic term, free of American sovereignty claims and free of philosophical debate, but it opens the door wide to regulation and governance. 

Why did “Advanced Intelligence Technologies” win? The answer is simple, and somewhat unsettling: because international institutions do not want to judge technology. They want to regulate it. SI implies that machines have surpassed human capabilities, a philosophical question financial institutions avoid. NHI suggests independent machine consciousness, an existential dilemma they prefer not to address.

However, AIT lets the international institutions set regulatory standards for central banks and companies without having to answer the hardest question of all: Is the machine conscious?

The term “advanced intelligence technologies” appears five times, and each reference serves a regulatory purpose: as a driver of investment and growth, without adopting the American “productivity shock” framing; as a source of macro-financial risk, without sliding into existential debate; as a condition for private sector-led growth; as a formal mandate for analysis and advice within the fund’s mandate; and as a tool for the fund’s own “prudent” internal modernization. The references function as carefully calibrated signals about how these technologies will be governed. 

For the world, the Bangkok statement reveals a shift far deeper than terminology. Issued on Oct. 17, as delegates prepared for the final day of meetings hosted by the Thai authorities, it exposes a terminological crisis reflecting the tug-of-war between the American national vision, represented by Washington and the Fed, and the multilateral vision, represented by international institutions. The former seeks to name things politically. The latter seeks to name them regulatorily. Yet the great paradox is that this “terminological neutrality” is not neutral at all.

Broad umbrella terms often succeed in international institutions because they allow fundamentally different political visions to coexist within a single consensus formula. Consensus, after all, is easier to achieve around a category than around a definition. The plural “technologies” allows the fund to encompass quantum computing, high-frequency trading algorithms, advanced blockchain networks, and future emerging systems under a single umbrella. It is an umbrella term that absorbs more than it describes. In that sense, it functions as a durable category for governance, capable of surviving multiple technological cycles without requiring a new vocabulary each time.

More importantly, the statement does not stop at the term. It explicitly ties it to the “Bangkok Blueprint” to help strengthen digital finance safeguards, cyber resilience, and international efforts to combat digital fraud, the flagship deliverable Thailand championed for its hosting year. In this context, the und is not discussing technology as a technical phenomenon. It is discussing it as new financial infrastructure that needs guarding. Guarding means regulating. Regulating means power.

The bottom line from the Joint IMF-WBG Annual Meetings in Bangkok was a declaration that the world has entered a new phase in which major technological transformations are managed not through philosophy and not through politics, but through regulatory language.

Whoever names the phenomenon can determine how it is governed, or whether it is governed at all. The Bangkok statement did not settle the debate over the nature of AI. But it settled something else. International institutions have chosen to treat these technologies as “tools” that require governance, not as “entities” that require definition.

That choice, cloaked in the language of neutrality and technocratic pragmatism, is ultimately a profound political decision to defer the philosophical question and press ahead with regulation, leaving the deeper reckoning for the future, when the governing language will already be firmly established.

• Dr. Abdel-Hameed Nawar is an associate professor of economics at Cairo University.