“UA Sovereignty” it’s a hot issue. It boils down to the idea of not being dependent on external AI platforms and technologies. It’s seen as a survival option as much as a more practical way to manage AI in general. Geopolitics, market forces and technological realities make this a very complex issue.
At the geopolitical level, it has become another “US or China” scenario. The recent blocking of external access to Anthropic’s main AI Claude is the truly brutal sticking point for pro-sovereignty arguments. Users outside the US were effectively locked out of border-level AI overnight.
At this level, sensitivity is very high. It doesn’t take much imagination to see what the jam could have done in any real-world operational environment. No one was even remotely impressed with the “national security” rationale for the shutdown. Claude is supposed to be the finder and fixer for system vulnerabilities, so they shut him down?
National responses have been varied. The response to AI sovereignty has been a bit mixed, but with common objectives:
Japan is working on a sovereign AI model.
Australia is in a state of understandable but annoying total indecisiveness about AI sovereignty at its most basic level.
Canada is getting an appropriate if demanding stance on AI management at the sovereign levelin the face of an even more demanding situation with relations with the USA. of Anthropogenic closure highlighted the dangers of dependency on external resources.
The EU has a broad theory of AI sovereignty, but implementation is likely to be costly and difficult in practice.
Data sovereignty it is a common and critical sticking point in broader arguments about sovereignty, underpinning the case for national jurisdiction.
Market forces are generating as much turbulence and irritation as AI. This market is extremely neurotic and highly volatile. of commercial AI services market is in total skank mode, selling whatever is available to anyone and anything around the world. Sovereignty is clearly not an issue for companies selling services. This rising tide of external AI capacity pushes the boundaries with ease. How much sovereignty can you really have?
Technologically, the “advance every second” scenario is loading forward, noise or not. Just keeping it up is hard work. In practical terms, AI should deliver value, not press releases. This is a major obstacle for those deploying and adopting AI in a muddled mess of expectations and current capabilities.
A harsh and completely unforgiving geopolitical environment
Moving like a shopping cart slowly moving down the center aisle is the US-China dichotomy. You are asked to choose a side between two antagonistic superpowers, and you have few options. Sovereignty seems like a much safer approach, for good reason.
There is no way to know or even guess which way this dichotomy will flip. Add to that the fact that nations must govern AI in their own jurisdictions, and “administrative straitjacket” is an understatement. In this scenario, sovereignty is seen as essential.
A less obvious but unavoidable problem is that almost all AI evolution effectively comes from the US or China. No one else is getting a say in the lead. No one wants to get involved in various conflicts.
This also blocks the external development of artificial intelligence and forces nations to follow any strange trail of breadcrumbs that comes from the two main sources. It’s a much bigger problem than it seems and can be seen as a limiting factor in the healthy development of AI.
The emerging reality of amorphous AI networks
AI creates state-of-the-art environments and ad hoc networks simply by connecting to the Cloud or the Internet. A single transaction can be global. Daily operations generate many transactions. Demand for services alone creates diversity and immediate demand. This formless and intense state of billions of transactions undermines theoretical real-time sovereignty.
There is something incredibly unrealistic about assuming that this end state of AI operations can be conducted in a pristine sovereign environment. Legalities create issues for administration across multiple jurisdictions.
This is also the key argument of sovereignty, trying to clarify legalities. The argument for sovereignty also equates to governing rules AI conduct and illegalities, the broad scope of which may be a future PhD subject. This is the truly non-negotiable part of the sovereignty argument, and it is anything but naive. Having two diametrically opposed primary sources of AI makes it very difficult to establish consistent rules.
Can AI be governed without sovereignty?
The short answer to this question is an unequivocal “No”. Any kind of legal government must be based on legal authority, and the default authority is national sovereignty. An international version would have to be something like trade treaties, based on agreements between individual nations. This would take a long time to implement between the parties. An international charter would be nice, but probably too difficult to implement in a contentious environment. Sovereignty is also the only real way of enforcing rules at the national level.
The theory of sovereignty seems naïve in such a complex mix of issues, but in practice, it is the only apparent possibility for any real AI governance. You can’t “assume” that everyone will be a good actor. you we cannot assume that global organized crime will not exploit AI because it is already doing so. Again, sovereignty is the default for law enforcement.
The conclusion is this:
You can’t have an entire class of technology that is beyond the law.
