On January 28, 2026, the play The Trials of Atlas received its first-ever staged reading at the Pyramid Conference Center in Tirana, Albania. The cast was drawn from among the participants of the Tällberg Workshop in Tirana, where fifteen emerging global leaders and their mentors had gathered for the launch of the 2026 TLML program — while their fellow participants filled the seats as audience. In the play, artificial intelligence stands accused of murder, and those watching are convened as jury. In Tirana, that framing was more than theatrical: the audience of peers, themselves selected from more than 400 applicants worldwide to wrestle with the defining challenges of the age, made for an unusually engaged and informed jury.
The choice to premiere The Trials of Atlas at the TLML workshop was deliberate. The Tällberg Foundation had structured its Tirana program around three urgent themes, chief among them the profound and still-unresolved consequences of advanced artificial intelligence on society. The play’s courtroom drama — probing questions of agency, accountability, and moral responsibility in an age of machine intelligence — gave those questions a human face and a living voice. For a first reading, the setting could hardly have been more fitting: a room full of emerging global leaders, in a country navigating its own dramatic transformation, sitting in judgment of what humanity has created — and what it might yet become.
