“Sovereign AI” has become a new front in the technology war between the United States and China

OpenAI announced A number of projects this year with Foreign governments To help build what she calls “sovereign AI” systems. The company says the deals, some of which are coordinated with the US government, are part of a broader push to give national leaders more control over technology that could reshape their economies.

Over the past few months, sovereign AI has become a buzzword in both Washington and Silicon Valley. Supporters of this concept say it is crucial that AI systems developed in democratic countries be able to spread globally, especially as China races to spread its AI technology abroad. “The distribution and dissemination of American technology will prevent our strategic competitors from making our allies dependent on a foreign adversary’s technology,” the Trump administration said in its statement. Artificial intelligence business plan Released in July.

At OpenAI, this move also meant partnering with countries like the United Arab Emirates, which is ruled by a confederation of monarchies. Jason Kwon, chief strategy officer at OpenAI, says partnering with non-democratic governments can help them evolve to become more liberal. “There’s a bet that engagement is better than containment,” Kwon said in an interview with WIRED last week at the Curve conference in Berkeley, California. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

Kwon’s reasoning reflects 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 push it absolutely in the wrong direction,” US President Bill Clinton. He said in 2000 When China was preparing to join the World Trade Organization. Since then, many American companies have grown rich through trade with China, but the country’s government has become more authoritarian.

Some people argue that true sovereignty can only be achieved if a government is able to vet the AI ​​model in question, and control it to some extent. “In my opinion, there is no sovereignty without open source,” says Clement Delango, CEO of Hugging Face, a company that hosts open source AI models. In this regard, China is already ahead, as its open source models have become very popular globally.

What actually is “sovereign AI”?

Today’s sovereign AI projects range from giving countries partial to full control over the entire technology stack, meaning the government manages all AI infrastructure, from hardware to software. “The main thing they all have in common is the legal piece — by linking at least part of the infrastructure to geographic boundaries, the design, development and deployment will then adhere to some national laws,” says Trisha Ray, associate director at the Atlantic Council’s Center for Geotechnology.

The deal announced by OpenAI in partnership with the US government in the UAE includes a 5 GW data center cluster And in Abu Dhabi (200 MW of the total planned capacity is supposed to be put into operation in 2026). The UAE is also rolling out ChatGPT nationwide, but it doesn’t look like the government will have any ability to look under the hood or change the inner workings of the chatbot.

Just a few years ago, the idea of ​​building AI infrastructure in authoritarian countries might have sparked worker protests in Silicon Valley. Google employees in 2019 He was pushed back against the tech giant’s plan to deploy a censored search engine in China, and eventually succeeded in having the project cancelled. “What happens with some LLM projects is quite similar, but there isn’t as much backlash,” Ray says. “The idea of, ‘Well, yeah, if you operate within the borders of a country, you have to abide by all the laws of the country,’ has become more normalized over time.”