Charles Clover is a security-and-defence correspondent at the Financial Times and a former Moscow bureau chief for the paper. He is the author of Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia's New Nationalism (Yale University Press, 2016), an intellectual history of Eurasianism as a theory of Russian identity and geopolitics (Source: unitedagents.co.uk; blogs.lse.ac.uk).
That background matters to how his AI coverage is framed: his prior subject was the ideological and strategic dimension of state power, not technology markets.
AI coverage
Clover wrote "The new arms race in computing power" (Financial Times, 22 May 2026), the paper's first major long-form treatment of compute as a strategic rather than commercial asset (The new arms race in computing power). Its argument is that computing power is becoming a determinant of national sovereignty, and it takes the United Kingdom as its worked case.
The framing places the piece in the compute-sovereignty literature rather than the AI-capability literature: the object of analysis is national capacity to procure, host, and control compute, not what models can do. That makes it a defence-desk treatment of a subject usually covered on technology desks — which is itself part of what the piece documents.