Weapon, wonder or both? Political framings of AI in global north and south media

As artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly understood as a political infrastructure and a decision-making technology with the potential to reshape institutions and reconfigure power relations, media coverage plays a key role in shaping public understanding of its risks and opportunities. This study examines how mainstream media outlets in the Global North and Global South politically frame AI, emphasising the implications for digital governance and public opinion. Building on prior work that analyse AI coverage but leaves its political and emotional dimensions underexplored, the research presents a comparative analysis of 6,829 news articles (2010–2024) across twelve newspapers from Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia and Oceania, combining topic modelling and sentiment analysis. The results reveal three temporal phases: an incipient phase (2010–2016), politicisation through crises (2017–2021), and exponential acceleration (2022–2024), with salient inflection points following the Cambridge Analytica scandal (2018) and the launch of ChatGPT (2022). Fifteen thematic frames emerged, dominated by Social Media and Tech Impact (16.03 per cent), Technology and the Digital Economy (12.54 per cent), and China–US Relations and Trade (11.41 per cent). Media outlets in the North display higher levels of pessimistic coverage , with 41.7 per cent of headlines classified as negative. In contrast, media in the South express a more optimistic tone, with 51.5 per cent of headlines being positive. The study demonstrates that media narratives about AI are shaped by geopolitical disputes, differing risk perceptions, and asymmetries in technological power, stressing the need for fair, transparent and ethical AI regulation.