Multilateralism and collaboration are surrendering to unilateralism, bilateralism, and competition in international relations. In this competitive and volatile geopolitical context, AI has become one of the most popular battlefields for nations competing for economic and security leadership.
Once upon a time, AI technologies were of interest primarily to researchers, tech firms, and specialized business and government teams that used them to help detect fraud, for example. The introduction of GenAI has changed all that, catapulting AI into the consciousness of regular employees and citizens.
Although our understanding of its real impact on business and our personal lives continues to fluctuate between hype and worrying ramifications, one thing is clear: AI is driving political agendas.
Nations are implementing digital sovereignty policies and strategies that encompass AI sovereignty as a bulwark of economic competitiveness and security. Two years after the release of ChatGPT, the world is reaching a climax of these AI sovereignty political power battles.
On January 13, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security, still under the Biden administration, announced export controls on advanced computing chips and certain closed AI model weights, alongside new license exceptions and updates to the Data Center Validated End User (VEU) authorization.
The same day, the U.K. Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology presented the AI Opportunities Action Plan, which sets the goal for the country “to provide global leadership in fairly and effectively seizing the opportunities of AI, as the U.K. have done on AI safety.”
One week later, under the new Trump administration, the Stargate Project, a $500 billion four-year initiative to build new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States, was announced. A week after that, the DeepSeek frenzy disrupted financial markets. On February 11, the President of the European Commission announced a plan that aims to mobilize €200 billion for AI. Even emerging countries, like Kazakhstan, are making their own investments.
From an economic competitiveness perspective, political leaders want to promote the growth of the national AI innovation ecosystem and ensure the resilience of their AI supply chains. From a national security perspective, they consider AI a means to protect their countries from kinetic and non-kinetic threats.
In this fast-evolving landscape, three archetypes of AI sovereignty are emerging. Countries’ positioning across the range of archetypes indicates how policy and regulation will evolve and impact technology suppliers.
The Three Archetypes of AI Sovereignty Policy
A full analysis of AI sovereignty policies — and their theoretical foundations in geopolitical strategies or data protection — is beyond the scope of this blog post. However, it is possible to compare archetypes by observing key dimensions, including:
• The strategic posture of the country defines what the nation commits to in the long term.
• The approach to AI governance determines how policymakers make decisions.
• The programs a country puts in place determine how the long-term vision translates into execution.
Taking those dimensions into account, three AI sovereignty archetypes are emerging.
Figure 1 — AI Sovereignty Policy Archetypes
