Ajita Agarwala
The Monetary Order in the Age of AI
Robert Triffin International , August 2026
Abstract
Monetary sovereignty has been approached as currency issuance, exchange rate management and capital controls. Yet as artificial intelligence gets incrementally embedded in the systems that move, allocate and settle money and securities, another\ dependency emerges - algorithmic - which existing scholarship on de-dollarisation and digital currency treats as a technical rather than a structural question. Building on the political economy of the petrodollar and on Triffin's account of reserve issuance, this paper conceptualises the compute-dollar: a self-reinforcing circuit in which dollar-denominated AI infrastructure services reproduce monetary hierarchy as the petrodollar once did through oil. Drawing on stablecoin adoption data, the MiCA, the GENIUS Act, mBridge and Agora, the paper argues that the ongoing currency fragmentation into currency blocs is not a multipolar equilibrium but an unstable interregnum, since a situation with an oligopoly of competing reserve currencies is structurally unstable. It concludes that monetary sovereignty in this interregnum cannot be held nationally but only pooled - through coalitions of interoperable CBDCs, shared AI capacity, and SDR-denominated instruments that create new means for multilateral settlements.
