Paper by the Tony Blair Institute: “…A more realistic and grounded understanding of sovereignty that reflects the realities of interdependence rather than the illusion of isolation is therefore needed. Sovereignty in the age of AI is not a binary condition to be achieved or lost. It is fundamentally a question of agency and choice – the ability of a state to make deliberate, future-oriented decisions about how AI is integrated, governed and used in line with its national goals.
Sovereignty is shaped by how well countries configure and negotiate their position within an inherently interdependent technological system. This requires balancing a persistent trilemma: pursuing control by investing in domestic capability, accessing frontier capability through global systems, and ensuring coherence across regulatory, industrial, fiscal and diplomatic strategies. No state can maximise all three simultaneously. The task of modern statecraft is to manage these trade-offs within the layers of the AI stack in ways that preserve strategic autonomy and expand national agency over time.
Effective AI sovereignty therefore cannot be pursued through isolation. It must be deliberately negotiated…(More)”.
