US warns against costly AI sovereignty push, calls India indispensable partner

US Under Secretary Jacob Helberg warned that digital sovereignty is being misused to justify rebuilding entire AI stacks. He said that approach wastes billions and underscored India's central role in the US technology race.

In Short

• Helberg said some governments misread sovereignty as total domestic technology ownership
• He warned such policies could waste billions duplicating existing digital infrastructure
• Resources, he argued, should fund future breakthroughs rather than outdated in-house systems

A senior US official has said the idea of digital and artificial intelligence sovereignty risks being used by political voices overseas in a way that could push countries into spending heavily to recreate technology that already exists. He said sovereignty should be seen through innovation and contribution to the global technology ecosystem, rather than complete in-house control of an older technology stack.

He also described India as an "indispensable" partner for the US in the global race for technological leadership, pointing to India’s engineering talent and growing technology ecosystem.

US Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg made the remarks while addressing the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum Leadership Summit in Washington. "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 highly appealing and could feel empowering. But, he added, "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 the idea that a country is not sovereign if it does 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.

Speaking about India, Helberg said, "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 India 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". Overall, Helberg’s remarks linked the debate on technology sovereignty with the need to focus on new innovation, while underlining India’s importance in the US technology partnership.

With PTI Inputs

- Ends