The new Mobile Suit Gundam series will be a metaphor for what would happen if AI ends up using us

One of the biggest upcoming anime series is Mobile Suit Gundam RG XARX-ZERO. Gundam remains one of anime’s biggest franchises, especially in Japan, and that has only become more firmly established after the stellar success of its latest iterations. They seem intent on reinforcing that with a series that will not only be part of a transmedia rollout, since it will appear for the first time in a decade alongside a video game adaptation, Gundam Rogue Orbit, but also with a theme especially relevant today: fear of AI.

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Or at least that’s what its director, Kenji Kamiyama, said in an interview with Variety. There, the creator said that the theme of the series is “Can we really master a technology we did not create ourselves, or will we end up being used by it? It’s a metaphor for technologies that humanity is already struggling to handle in real life, like AI”.

The perfect man for the job

In any case, this is not the first time Kamiyama has dealt with similar themes. He already tackled similar ideas in the excellent Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit and Eden of the East, showing that he is the right person to explore these kinds of questions.

He also made it clear that “I try to come up with surprises while taking the utmost care not to stray from that shared vision” and, about the video game, that “the project started first with the video game, but since the game team didn’t have a defined setting, I built the world around the question of what the Gundam fights against”. So it seems he has had enough freedom for, indeed, Mobile Suit Gundam RG XARX-ZERO to be one of the standout series of the year when it premieres in 2027.