The Future Bond in the Age of Algorithms

In 2025, the rights to the Bond series went to Amazon MGM Studios. Meanwhile, my book was released on Amazon in an expanded English-language edition. On this occasion, I attempted to sketch a prediction for the future of 007 in this new reality.

Daniel Craig's era was a response to the post-9/11 world—a world of asymmetrical warfare, internal betrayal, and moral ambiguity. However, that world, too, is already receding into the past. The new James Bond, whoever he may be, will step onto a geopolitical chessboard with entirely new rules, where his old enemies seem almost like a sentimental memory. The crisis of trust in Western institutions, culminating in Brexit and the 2016 U.S. election, has shown that the enemy no longer needs to come from the outside. It can be born within, fueled by algorithms and disinformation. In this new architecture of threats, the ultimate weapon is not a satellite with a laser, but an algorithm capable of "predicting intentions, desires, and understanding context" to manipulate individuals and entire societies in a way that makes the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal look like an amateur experiment.

The new 007 will face powerful, intersecting forces that are redefining the nature of global threats. The first of these is the return of great power competition, often described as a "Second Cold War." The old axis of left versus right has faded, replaced by a clash between autocracy and democracy. On this new chessboard, China has become the senior partner, and Russia the junior one. This conflict is being waged on an entirely new battlefield: global economic interdependence, where the struggle is for control over infrastructure, finance, and, above all, digital networks. In this clash, the nuclear warhead might be replaced by a suitcase full of the latest AI chips from Nvidia, which are under a U.S. embargo designed to slow China's AI development and military modernization.

Our daily lives are also becoming a battlefield. The new weapon is not a laser satellite, but the TikTok algorithm. The app, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has become a global phenomenon. However, there are well-founded concerns that the Chinese government could not only gain access to the data of millions of users but also subtly manipulate the algorithm to promote propaganda, sow disinformation, and influence the social mood of young people in the West. A villain no longer needs to plant bugs in an embassy; it is enough for his spies to use Huawei or Xiaomi smartphones with built-in "backdoors." Everyday technology can also become a weapon, as when the Israeli Mossad embedded explosive charges in 5,000 pagers ordered by the Lebanese group Hezbollah.

However, the new Bond's most elusive enemy may be a technology that has spun out of control. The era of Elliot Carver and his media manipulations seems like child's play today compared to the power of large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence. This is no longer a matter of disinformation, but of shaping reality itself. North Korean hackers are already using LLMs to create fake profiles and pass job interviews at Western tech companies, stealing industrial secrets. In October 2023, a British court sentenced a 21-year-old to nine years in prison after he, in a conversation with a "supportive" chatbot, planned an assassination attempt on Queen Elizabeth II. This is a chilling testament to the fact that the new "criminal mastermind" may not have a face, but may be merely a digital leviathan, a piece of code capable of sowing real-world destruction by manipulating the human psyche.

Simultaneously, Bond will have to confront an erosion of moral certainty. Conflicts such as the war in Gaza, which erupted after the attacks of October 7, 2023, have led to an unprecedented polarization of public opinion. Issues like Zionism, war crimes, and the very definition of terrorism have entered the mainstream, and Great Britain's allies are being accused of complicity in actions that a significant part of the world views as criminal. What if Bond is sent on a mission in cooperation with Mossad, and his target is a person whom half the world considers a freedom fighter? An additional challenge for Bond could be the fragility of old alliances. Initiatives like Donald Trump's "Project 2025" in the U.S., which call for dismantling independent intelligence agencies and replacing them with political loyalists, threaten to paralyze the CIA and shatter the existing alliance.

Furthermore, the entanglement with figures like Elon Musk, the head of leading technology companies who does not hide his ultra-right-wing sympathies, is fraught with controversy. The emergence of such individuals presents Western intelligence agencies with an entirely new kind of challenge: how to treat a person who is neither an ally nor an enemy, yet commands a technological arsenal surpassing that of many nations? His personal empire combines control over the global energy supply chain (Tesla battery factories), potential military hardware (contracts for Cybertrucks), and, above all, a monopoly on communication. The Starlink satellite network proved crucial for Ukraine's defense, giving Musk personal geopolitical leverage: the ability to turn the internet on and off over a war zone. His social media platform, X, powered by its own AI, Grok, has become a global tool for shaping public opinion under the banner of absolute free speech. Add to this the Neuralink project, which aims to connect the human brain to the global network, and you have a figure who is the digital equivalent of Hugo Drax and Elliot Carver rolled into one. His role as a key technology supplier for the U.S. Department of Defense makes him both an indispensable asset and an unpredictable, powerful player. What role is Agent 007 to play when his greatest ally is dependent on the whims of a single man who himself possesses an arsenal worthy of a Bond villain?

How is Bond supposed to fight an enemy that has no body, no financial motive, and whose only goal is to optimize chaos? These are the questions that the creators of the next films will have to answer if Agent 007 is to survive in this new era.