For some time people have spoken of the concept of sovereign AI. Sovereign AI refers to a government’s or organization’s control over AI technologies and associated data. At the start of 2025 such an idea isn’t just talk any more. It’s rapidly happening.
It’s most obvious in Europe. Just as the US gears up to become more autocratic, the EU has passed laws to ban the AI that enables it. This week the bloc banned AI it deems ‘unacceptable risk’. Among other things, it bans AI that manipulates and deceives, targets minorities, allows biometric profiling, or predictive policing. Almost everything on the list is something American Big Tech is doing with the encouragement of the current administration. To make the point clearer, the EU is building its own AI for European governments, institutions and civil service to use.
China is building AI the equal of any, and in the case of DeepSeek, perhaps the best there is. Not only that, they are Open-Sourcing it. There’s no reason to think they will slow down. In fact, China may accelerate in AI; they have a huge trove of public data to use for training that the Chinese government has recently decided to make available for the first time. China is many countries in South America and Africa’s main trade and technology partner. Where that is the case they may be its main AI source too.
American Big Tech has historically been used to dominating globally, but there are all the signs that it isn’t going to happen with AI.
EU has no significant AI prowess to speak of, so it cannot be counted among the main players in the race. EU is just a consumer of American and Chinese AI that can only hope to maybe do some regulation with it.
That’s stupid, nothing is siloed except US closed-source AI. And not for long since they are rapidly losing their lead.
Ever since the news of Deekseek dropped, there is an exponential increase of misinformation about AI. Everyone is just regurgitating talking points completely removed from reality, created by people that have no idea what they are talking about or intentionally lying. It’s madening.
There is a massive (actually) open AI community in the US. Even Meta publishes their best models.
The EU is never going to use anything other than open source models they didn’t develop because we are just too slow here. The Chinese shared all their best models so far with the open-source community. No one cares abour their other models.
Everyone is always just using the best model no matter where it comes from. You see Europeans and Americans building on Chinese models and vice versa.
There is no siloing. Not for the forseeable future anyway, all this legislation is inconsequential and will be reversed on a dime if they feel like missing out on muh GDP growth.
