Digital sovereignty concept being weaponised: US official

The concept of digital and artificial intelligence sovereignty is in the danger of being weaponised by different political voices overseas, a senior US official said here, urging nations not to "sink" billions of dollars in "re-inventing" a technology that already exists.

US Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg was addressing the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF) Leadership Summit here.

"In my view, sovereignty comes from being a net contributor to the world's innovation ecosystem. It is about innovation sovereignty, not just 'do you control last year's stack entirely in-house'," Helberg said.


He said the idea of sovereignty was incredibly appealing and feels very empowering for the people.

"The danger is that that concept is being weaponised by a number of different political voices overseas to be interpreted in a way that it really means we are going to rebuild in-house the entire stack top to bottom in order to be sovereign," he said.

He said the idea that a country is not sovereign if it did not control its full artificial intelligence stack was "incredibly backward" and economically dangerous.

"...because what that means is these countries are going to sink billions of dollars in resources to reinvent something that already exists. They will likely get massively suboptimal results," he said.

"All of that engineering power, all of those dollars are resources that could be going towards building the next innovation, not towards getting a subpar version of last year's innovations," he added.

Helberg also described India as an "indispensable" partner for the US in the global race for technological leadership.

"India is especially interesting because it's not only a country with whom we have a deep values alignment, but India obviously is the only country on Earth that fundamentally rivals China, with respect to the depth of its engineering workforce and talent pool," he said.

Helberg noted that it has a "true nascent technology ecosystem and is making some pretty incredible contributions at the application layer, which we think is absolutely essential for technology diffusion". PTI