Cory Doctorow isn’t buying the sovereign AI pitch. The author and activist, who coined the term ‘enshittification,’ dismissed the concept as ‘nonsense’ in a recent talk, arguing that what countries really need as the US-led world order frays isn’t their own massive language models — it’s control over their own apps and datacenters.
His argument cuts against the grain of a tech industry that’s been selling nations on the idea of building homegrown AI infrastructure. Doctorow sees that as a distraction. The real vulnerability, he suggests, isn’t a lack of domestic AI models but a dependence on foreign-controlled software stacks and cloud infrastructure. If you’re running your government services on someone else’s cloud, your sovereignty is already compromised long before anyone trains a model.
The timing is pointed. With the Trump administration dismantling elements of the international order that countries have relied on for decades, the question of digital independence is moving from abstract policy papers to urgent reality. Doctorow’s prescription — sovereign apps and sovereign datacenters — is less flashy than a national ChatGPT clone but arguably more foundational. You can’t have sovereign AI if the servers it runs on answer to a foreign court order.
It’s a classic Doctorow reframe: take a buzzword the industry is using to sell expensive kit, and redirect attention to the unglamorous plumbing that actually determines who has power. Whether policymakers listen is another question. They rarely get ribbon-cutting ceremonies for datacenter sovereignty.
