Navigating AI Sovereignty
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Countries worldwide are making strategic choices about AI capabilities. Some are committing hundreds of billions to technological leadership. Others are building regulatory frameworks to shape global standards. All recognise that AI will influence economic competitiveness, national security, and democratic governance.
AI sovereignty refers to a nation’s capacity to develop, control, and govern AI technologies according to its own priorities, ensuring both sovereignty over AI infrastructure and sovereignty through interventions related to AI governance and security.
The UK Government has committed significant resources in pursuit of AI sovereignty; £2 billion in investments, ambitious plans for compute infrastructure, proposals for new AI Growth Zones, and international collaborations such as the US-UK Technology Prosperity Partnership. The question is whether they add up to sovereignty or to managed dependence. These supply-side investments in AI infrastructure, research, and partnerships sit alongside deepening dependencies on foreign AI systems. Without demand-side mechanisms, these interventions provide temporary access to technology rather than lasting capacity. In such an environment, public services adopt AI to improve efficiency, but default to established tech companies as providers, entrenching dependencies. UK AI companies, lacking anchor customers, struggle to secure the revenue and real-world validation needed to scale. Competition policy, which could encourage diversified supply chains, is sidelined when regulatory interventions are perceived as a threat to inward investment. What follows is an ecosystem that delivers world-class innovation, but which is leveraged to build capabilities for overseas businesses, while public spending entrenches the dependencies that a sovereign AI strategy should reduce.
Integration across industrial and innovation policy can help the UK move toward shared sovereignty goals. World-class research needs adoption pathways. Infrastructure investments need to reduce strategic dependencies. Partnerships need to build domestic capacity in the long-term, not only provide access to technology today. Without integration across these supply-side and demand-side aspects of AI development, even substantial commitments risk leaving the UK in a position where it lacks the autonomy to make strategic choices.
AI brings with it a larger interface with economics, security, and democracy than traditional infrastructure; its deployment has multiple points of exposure where foreign control affects UK operations, from data centres, to models, to applications. In managing these points of exposure, the UK possesses distinctive assets in research, sectoral expertise, regulatory credibility, and international networks. Whether current policy structures can leverage these assets effectively, or whether achieving meaningful sovereignty requires rethinking how supply-side investments, defensive priorities, and demand-side decisions connect, is the question this brief addresses.
You can read the full policy brief at this link.
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