Sovereign AI Stacks: The New Strategic National Resource - TechSurge: Deep Tech Podcast

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Episode notes

As artificial intelligence becomes a strategic capability for nations as well as companies, questions of governance, safety, and geopolitical competition are moving to the forefront. In this episode of TechSurge, host Sriram Viswanathan speaks with Helen Toner, Interim Executive Director of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown and a former OpenAI board member, about the rise of sovereign AI stacks and the global implications of increasingly powerful AI systems. Helen brings a rare vantage point from both inside the frontier AI ecosystem and the policy world. She reflects on lessons from her time on the OpenAI board, including the governance challenges that arise when nonprofit missions intersect with enormous commercial incentives and rapid technological progress. As AI capabilities accelerate, she argues that the industry is still grappling with deep uncertainty about how these systems work, how they will evolve, and what responsibilities companies and governments should carry. The conversation explores the idea of sovereign AI; the growing push by countries to control key layers of the AI stack, including compute infrastructure, models, and data.