Sovereignty as a service is an interesting idea. One problem with this article. The author repeatedly states that nations that can't build their own AI infrastructure will come to depend on those that can. However, by the author's own words, those that can build it become dependent on the corporations they contract with. Consequently, only State-built and State-run AI preserves anything like State sovereignty. Arguably, the West has already outsourced sovereignty to the corporate world, but if this article is right, its new dependency on AI completes the job.
This is a fair critique... and it cuts deeper than the piece does.
The article traces dependency from nations that can't build AI infrastructure to nations that can. But you're right: even the nations that "can" build are contracting with corporations to do it. The US doesn't build sovereign AI infrastructure. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google do. China's closer with state involvement, but still depends on corporate execution.
So the sovereignty transfer isn't just small nations → powerful nations. It's all nations → corporations. The West has already outsourced this, and AI dependency makes it structural rather than reversible.
State-built, state-run AI is the only model that preserves sovereignty in any traditional sense. Which means the number of truly sovereign actors in this system is smaller than the piece suggests. Probably much smaller.
Good catch. That's a darker implication than I fully explored.
Sovereignty as a service is an interesting idea. One problem with this article. The author repeatedly states that nations that can't build their own AI infrastructure will come to depend on those that can. However, by the author's own words, those that can build it become dependent on the corporations they contract with. Consequently, only State-built and State-run AI preserves anything like State sovereignty. Arguably, the West has already outsourced sovereignty to the corporate world, but if this article is right, its new dependency on AI completes the job.
This is a fair critique... and it cuts deeper than the piece does.
The article traces dependency from nations that can't build AI infrastructure to nations that can. But you're right: even the nations that "can" build are contracting with corporations to do it. The US doesn't build sovereign AI infrastructure. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google do. China's closer with state involvement, but still depends on corporate execution.
So the sovereignty transfer isn't just small nations → powerful nations. It's all nations → corporations. The West has already outsourced this, and AI dependency makes it structural rather than reversible.
State-built, state-run AI is the only model that preserves sovereignty in any traditional sense. Which means the number of truly sovereign actors in this system is smaller than the piece suggests. Probably much smaller.
Good catch. That's a darker implication than I fully explored.
Dependency on corporate actors is already structural. AI just adds more threads to the binding.