AI AND ML

Sovereign AI is 'nonsense,' says Doctorow

As Trump dismantles the US-led world order, what the rest of the world really needs is sovereign apps and datacenters, argues 'enshittification' coiner

OPINION Cory Doctorow, tech gadfly and coiner of the eminently relevant term "enshittification," posted a useful argument on Wednesday related to Trump's dismantling of the US-led world order and the need or lack thereof for other countries to control their own AI destinies.

Doctorow has positioned himself as an AI skeptic in his writings, including his recent book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI – the name comes from the visualization of a human body (you and me, humble users) being led by a mindless horse's head (AI) – and this latest post fits into that vein well, calling the need for a sovereign AI "nonsense."

The conversation began with a post from Australian writer John Quiggin, who explained how the US president is systematically dismantling all of the sources of the United States' strength over the last century – diplomatic, military, financial, and, most relevant to Reg readers, technological.

Quiggin posited that the current American dominance of AI poses a particular risk to the rest of the world, which understandably doesn't want to rely on a chaotic and unpredictable American state, although even he was skeptical that the frontier labs' Vegas binge-spending approach would necessarily pay off:

"My optimistic view is that this is a race that will be won by low-energy tortoises rather than hyper-active hares. Second movers like Deepseek and, more recently the French Mistral, running maybe a year behind the US leaders, can replicate their capabilities at a fraction of the cost, and without reliance on massive data centres."

Not wrong, in our view, as our systems editor Tobias Mann recently opined. But as Doctorow points out, that is only relevant if you believe AI is relevant. And Doctorow clearly does not.

He notes that if Trump were to suddenly turn off all the AI chatbots being used by other nations, it probably wouldn't damage their businesses in any significant way. But if he were to order Microsoft to disable Office 365 or John Deere to brick its tractors, that would have an immediate, measurable economic impact.

As he put it:

"In the face of these real, non-speculative, immediate, grave threats, focusing on AI – the money-losingest technology in human history, which has consistently underperformed relative to its boosters' promises – is just misguided … The real digital challenge is building apps and data centres to run everyday administrative, telecoms and e-commerce software on, and then moving your country's, ministries', companies' and households' data over to the new platforms."

Amen to that.

AI may or may not be the future – it's certainly a lively topic of debate at Vulture HQ – but there's a clear and present danger, and American tech companies have made it abundantly clear that they will not speak or act out against the president or US government until and unless the shifting political tides dictate it's advantageous for them to do so. Same as it ever was. Europe would be wise to invest in alternatives wherever it can.

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