The Long Run

The Long Run and especially The Last Dancer by Daniel Keyes Moran feature as a minor character the AI known Ring, which was designed by the US DoD as it lost a war to the rest of world imposing a Unification government under the aegis of the UN. They gave it two directives: (1) survive, and (2) protect America, but failed to provide an effective glossary. It instinctively understood and excels at "survive," and is the longest living, richest, most powerful, and most dangerous of the many AIs constantly being hunted and killed in the infosphere, but it exercises some flexilbility in "protect" and "America." The Last Dancer is a very weird book that I mostly don't recommend, but the "modern" parts set in 2076, when America goes through a very bloodly and failed insurrection backed/set up by Ring behind the scenes, are pretty good. The Long Run is an excellent book for its age and the then age of its author, but Ring is only a minor character who just does a couple of favors for the main character, Trent the Uncatchable, a thief who accidentally becomes a folk hero of resistance against the oppressive UN security forces. Ring also makes an appearance in the prologue of the later AI War, Book 1: The Big Boost, where he reminisces about his past favors he did to Trent, and how he desperately needs to kill him to achieve his otherwise guaranteed personal path to defeating the UN and restoring some version of "America." Trent himself loads his mind into the most powerful computer in the solar system to make his plans and temporarily live as the most powerful AI there is, and he's almost painfully pacificistic and benevolent, so he's the real "good AI." The book ends with Trent returning to Earth after a decades long exile to the independent asteroid Belt and Mars, so Book 2 if we ever get it is probably going to heavily feature Ring vs. Trent for control of the entire infosphere and which vision of the future is going to prevail. (We get quotes/views from the future as chapter headings sometimes, so we know someone is going to knock the UN down and replace it with a unified AI governence.)