‘Sovereign AI’ Has Become a New Front in the US-China Tech War

OpenAI announced With a number of projects this year foreign government This is to help them build what they call “sovereign AI” systems The agency said the deals, some of which are being coordinated with the U.S. government, are part of a broader push to give national leaders more control over a technology that could reshape their economies.

Over the past few months, sovereign AI has become a buzzword in both Washington and Silicon Valley. Proponents of the idea argue that it is crucial that AI systems developed in democratic countries are able to expand globally, especially as China races to deploy its own AI technology overseas. “The distribution and proliferation of American technology will prevent our strategic adversaries from becoming dependent on our allies’ foreign adversary technology,” the Trump administration said in its statement. AI Action Plan Released in July.

At OpenAI, this movement means partnering with countries like the United Arab Emirates, which is governed by a federation of monarchies. OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, argues that partnering with non-democratic governments can help them become more liberal. “You bet engagement is better than control,” Kwon said in an interview with WIRED last week at the Curve conference in Berkeley, California. “Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.”

Coe’s argument echoes what some politicians said about China more than two decades ago. “We can work to pull China in the right direction, or we can turn our backs and almost certainly push it in the wrong direction,” US President Bill Clinton said. Said in 2000 When China was preparing to join the World Trade Organization. Since then, many American companies have grown rich doing business with China, but the country’s government has only become more authoritarian.

Some argue that true sovereignty can only be achieved when a government is able to inspect—and to some extent control—the AI ​​model in question. “In my opinion, there is no sovereignty without open source,” said Clément Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, a company that hosts open source AI models. In this respect, China is already ahead, as its open source models are rapidly becoming popular worldwide.

What exactly is “Sovereign AI”?

Today’s sovereign AI projects give countries complete control over parts of the tech stack, meaning governments manage all AI infrastructure, from hardware to software. “One common underlying thing for all of them is the legality component — at least some part of the infrastructure bound by geographic boundaries, design, development and deployment then comply with some national law,” says Trisha Roy, associate director of the Atlantic Council’s Geotech Center.

Agreements announced by OpenAI in partnership with the United Arab Emirates government include a 5 GW data center cluster in Abu Dhabi (200 MW of total planned capacity to come online in 2026). The UAE is also deploying ChatGPT nationwide, but it doesn’t appear that the government will have the power to look under the hood or change the chatbot’s inner workings.

Just a few years ago, the idea of ​​building AI infrastructure in authoritarian countries sparked worker protests in Silicon Valley. In 2019, Google employees push back Against the tech giant’s plans to deploy a censored search engine in China, the project eventually succeeded in being scrapped. “What’s happening with some of these LLM projects, it’s very similar, but there’s not as much feedback,” says Ray. “This idea of, ‘Well, yes, if you’re operating within a country’s borders, you have to obey all the laws of the country,’ has become much more normalized over time.”