The Coming Wave

Mustafa Suleyman isn’t an outside observer speculating about artificial intelligence — he co-founded DeepMind, one of the labs that helped build the modern AI era, and later started Inflection AI. That background gives The Coming Wave a different texture than most books in this space. Rather than debating whether AI will be good or bad, Suleyman and co-author Michael Bhaskar focus on a narrower, thornier problem: technologies like AI and synthetic biology are becoming cheaper, more powerful, and more accessible at the same time, and our existing tools for managing that kind of power — nation-states, regulation, international agreements — were built for a different era. The book traces historical waves of transformative technology to show how containment has succeeded or failed in the past, then applies those lessons to the current moment. It’s not a doom narrative, but it doesn’t offer easy comfort either. What makes it worth reading is the specificity: this is someone who has sat in the rooms where these decisions get made, laying out what containment would actually require and why it’s so difficult to achieve. For readers wanting a serious, structurally-minded look at AI’s trajectory rather than another speculative take, this delivers.