Article by The Economist: “WHEN THE leaders of the biggest Western economies gathered last month in the French Alps for the G7 summit, it was not just presidents and prime ministers in attendance. The bosses of America’s leading artificial-intelligence firms—Sam Altman of OpenAI, Sir Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind and Dario Amodei of Anthropic—were seated alongside the political bigwigs. Even the stewards of the mightiest economies, it turns out, are buttering up the potentates of AI.
Days before the summit, America’s government had barred Anthropic from making its most advanced model available to foreigners. OpenAI soon imposed similar restrictions on some of its frontier systems. The move turned a simmering concern into a burning one: might countries without their own, home-grown AI firms end up excluded from the world-changing technology? Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, warned that no one would buy American AI if it could “turn off the switch” at will. The American AI labs’ Chinese rivals offer only faint reassurance. On July 7th Reuters reported that Chinese officials, too, were considering restricting foreigners’ access to leading AI models.
Sovereign chic
Caught between the world’s two AI superpowers, governments are increasingly pinning their hopes on “sovereign AI”: the idea that countries should limit their dependence on foreign providers of AI by actively developing domestic AI firms and infrastructure. Announcements of such initiatives are proliferating. The European Union has unveiled a technology-sovereignty package encompassing semiconductors, AI and cloud computing. Canada has launched its own plan to reduce reliance on American technology providers. India, Japan and Singapore are backing domestic AI infrastructure and models. The Centre for a New American Security (CNAS), a think-tank in Washington, estimates that the number of state-backed AI projects outside America and China grew fivefold over the course of 2024 and 2025 (see chart 1). Governments have announced investments of $70bn-plus in such initiatives, according to CNAS’s tally.
Yet turning these ambitions into reality will be extremely difficult. No matter what, most countries will still rely on American chips, Chinese open-source models or both to build their AI systems. Even then, most governments will find it prohibitively expensive to achieve anything remotely resembling AI sovereignty.
The incentive to seek it, however, is clear and compelling. Pablo Chavez of CNAS puts the restrictions on Anthropic in a “long line of events” demonstrating America’s willingness to use its technological dominion as a weapon. In the dying days of Joe Biden’s presidency in 2025, America proposed sweeping export controls that would have rationed access to advanced chips through a complex licensing regime. When Donald Trump became president a few weeks later he dropped the plan. But he has not hesitated to use America’s lead in AI as leverage in trade negotiations. The Department of Commerce is considering rules that would allow it to vet all sales of AI chips designed by American firms anywhere in the world. It might also insist that buyers allow inspections or monitoring to make sure chips are being used as promised. Another possible requirement could be to invest in American AI infrastructure in exchange for access…(More)”.
