High vs. Low AGI: Ontology and Conceptual Taxonomy for Geopolitical Coherence

Abstract: The rapid progression of AGI research demands conceptual tools capable of distinguishing between systems developed for open, commercial integration and those destined for sovereign, securitized deployments. Without such distinctions, risk assessments and regulatory debates collapse AGI into legacy dual-use frameworks that are ill-suited for these resources, capturing the possibility of civilian and military application but overlooking the distinct societal lineages yielded by corporate and state-grade architectures. This paper proposes a taxonomy distinguishing low-AGI and high-AGI, clarifying how commercial-economic and security-sovereign architectures can be distinguished not only by function, but by the social and political ecosystems that produce them. The taxonomy builds on international relations concepts of "high/low politics," viewed through the lens of construal-level theory, which allows it to even capture how cooperation and conflict may coexist in the context of AGI's emerging geopolitical stakes. By embedding AGI within power structures and securitization theory, this contribution extends dual-use discourse through an ontological taxonomy that enables more granular risk assessment and governance design--equipping policymakers and researchers to anticipate security dilemmas, institutional demands, and technical-political spillovers in the international system.