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.”
Kwon is adamant that OpenAI will not censor information even if asked by a foreign government. “We’re not going to suppress informational resources,” he says. “We might add, but we’re not going to eliminate.”
Beijing’s Head Start
While US AI firms race to partner with foreign leaders, Chinese tech companies are spreading their open source models across the globe. Giants like Alibaba and Tencent, as well as startups like DeepSeek, have released open source foundation models that essentially match the capabilities of US rivals.
Alibaba says that its Qwen family of AI models have been downloaded more than 300 million times worldwide, and over 100,000 derivative models have been built using them. Startups in countries like Japan have widely adopted Qwen after discovering that it excels at completing tasks in the local language. Last month, researchers in the UAE released a new state-of-the-art model built on top of the Qwen2.5.
Earlier this year, OpenAI released its first open weight models since GPT-2. While the project had been in the works for a while, OpenAI was also galvanized by the popularity of models released by China’s DeepSeek, which exploded on the scene in January, according to WIRED’s previous reporting.
Focusing on open source models has allowed Chinese AI companies to iterate rapidly, says Delangue, since rival firms can quickly adopt each other’s training tricks.
“They went from being very behind five years ago to now being on par with the US and dominating open source,” he says. “It wouldn’t be surprising if China was ahead in AI in general next year.”
China’s open source strategy, Delangue argues, also helps its AI infrastructure investments go further. “One gigawatt in the US, where most of the field is closed source, means that every single lab is basically doing the same training run,” he says. “In Europe or in China, because it’s much more open source and open science, the same gigawatt is actually distributed between the labs, because there’s one lab doing the training and then they’re releasing their models, which means that the neighboring lab doesn’t need to do the same training.”
OpenAI, for its part, argues that both open and closed models can be part of the sovereign AI approach. “It doesn’t seem like we are on the path where there’s just one model,” Kwon says. “You see that when you go to various countries and they want to use both the best models that are closed, and then they also want to have open models that they also rely on for various types of use cases.”
This is an edition of the Model Behavior newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
