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

OpenAI has announced a number of projects this year with foreign governments to help build out what it has called their “sovereign AI” systems. The company says the deals, some of which are being coordinated with the US 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 something of a buzzword in both Washington and Silicon Valley. Proponents of the concept argue it’s crucial that AI systems developed in democratic nations are able to proliferate globally, particularly as China races to deploy its own AI technology abroad. “The distribution and diffusion of American technology will stop our strategic rivals from making our allies dependent on foreign adversary technology,” the Trump administration said in its AI Action Plan released in July.

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

Kwon’s reasoning 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 in 2000 when China was gearing up to join the World Trade Organization. Since then, many American companies have gotten rich by trading with China, but the country’s government has only become more authoritarian.

Some people argue that true sovereignty can only be achieved if 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,” says Clément Delangue, the 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 quickly becoming popular globally.

What Is “Sovereign AI” Actually?

Today’s sovereign AI projects range from giving countries partial to full control over the entire tech stack, meaning the government manages all of the AI infrastructure, from hardware to software. “The one common underlying thing for all of them is the legality portion—by having at least some part of the infrastructure tied to geographical boundaries, the design, development, and deployment would then adhere to some national laws,” says Trisha Ray, an associate director at the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center.

The deal OpenAI announced in partnership with the US government in the UAE includes a 5 gigawatt data center cluster in Abu Dhabi (200 megawatts of the total planned capacity is supposed to come online in 2026). The UAE is also deploying ChatGPT nationwide, but it doesn’t appear that the government will have any ability to look under the hood or alter the chatbot’s inner workings.

Only a few years ago, the idea of building AI infrastructure in authoritarian countries might have sparked worker protests in Silicon Valley. In 2019, Google employees pushed back against the tech giant’s plan to deploy a censored search engine in China, eventually succeeding in getting the project canceled. “What’s happening with some of these LLM projects, it’s quite similar, but there isn’t as much of a backlash,” Ray says. “That notion of, ‘well, yes, if you’re operating within a country’s borders, you have to adhere to all laws of the land,’ that’s become a lot more normalized over time.”