Artificial intelligence has rapidly come to be seen as a threat to national sovereignty. Accordingly, it is bringing forth state responses. Because digital technology, even in China, is for the most part developed by private companies seeking profit, state responses have to accommodate and even enhance market forces. At the same time, AI companies are expected to grapple with the non-market goals of states — and, in democracies, of the people those states represent. Unlike their predecessors in search and social media, AI companies from the beginning have had to ponder their own legitimacy, social and political, which is very different from explaining their prospects of profitability to investors. Underneath it all there is still a genuine business justification for identifying a social mission: if the AI companies cannot gin up a plausible social purpose of some kind, their businesses could be targeted by regulation that would hurt or eliminate profits. So, for better or worse, large corporations are getting into the legitimacy game.
This is not altogether new. In the late 1990s, browser companies were required by government to find ways to defend their systems from abuse by the “Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse”: drug dealers, money launderers, terrorists, and child pornographers. (The idea that Internet companies were “content-neutral” was always a fiction.) Email providers had to control spammers and financial fraudsters. The digital-tech industry has always shouldered some social burdens as costs of business lower than the costs of being more actively regulated.
However, AI is qualitatively and quantitatively different. The training data for AI large language models (LLMs) is so vast, and the computational capacity at once so extraordinary and accessible, that AI can create worlds which we are then invited to inhabit. Each world is different, both actually and, more important, potentially. DeepSeek world is not the same as Claude world or ChatGPT world or Mistral world or Grok world. Chinese LLMs are required to carry out censorship along lines set by the government. It is easy to imagine an LLM offering a world in which most of reality is reflected accurately except that every battle your nation fought was a victory and every leader a hero.
The LLM and other AI companies know this and are trying to get ahead of the social-regulatory curve. So Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, talks about his company as having at its core a mission to defend the values of the United States, as he understands them, and of the West. Elon Musk, of Grok and much else, talks increasingly of a mission to save the white race from decline. OpenAI sees its role as advancing “democratic AI” as against China’s “authoritarian AI.” Chinese AI companies meanwhile must adhere to “socialist values” and advance the cause of the Chinese Communist Party — which, interestingly, is acquiring a more ethnic cast. European anxiety about digital platforms that don’t respect European values is being made much worse by AI. The situation has become so pronounced that the invaluable Center for a New American Security (CNAS) just launched a “Sovereign AI Index: Tracking the Global Push for AI Self-Reliance.” The “self” being referred to here is, with partial exception for the EU, a nation-state self.
In short, AI is being positioned as a booster for nationalism, perhaps even ethno-nationalism. This must be about the opposite of what AI’s early visionaries imagined they were working toward. But it is a clear trend. Every state is jealous when calculating its powers, and states are working hard to make AI submit to sovereignty.
Are there counter-trends? There are, and we will look at those in the second and final post.