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Newcomer Pod · 3 min · Jun 26, 2026
Democratic countries need sovereign AI for resilience
Aidan Gomez
Aidan Gomez argues that democratic countries are too dependent on a few U.S. tech providers for critical systems.
The episode’s best minutes
Full episode- 11:35Democratic countries need sovereign AI for resilience3 min
- 3:18Enterprise AI use can grow far beyond codingPro pick 3 min
- 18:25AI agents may displace workers more than past technologies3 min
- 3 more moments in the full episode
“And the first thing you learn as a computer scientist or engineer is don't build a single point of failure.”
Aidan Gomezat 12:55 · Newcomer Pod
Takeaways
- Critical workloads need customer-controlled infrastructure.
- A provider cutoff could threaten essential national services.
- AI capability should spread across allied democracies.
About this segment
Aidan Gomez argues that democratic countries are too dependent on a few U.S. tech providers for critical systems. He says sovereign deployments create backups and resilience.
Aidan Gomez is a Cohere co-founder and Transformer co-author.
Co-founded Cohere, the sovereign AI company, and co-authored the Transformer paper, Attention Is All You Need.
- EN
Eric Newcomer, Host
From “Aidan Gomez Unfiltered on AGI, China & AI's Biggest Risk”, Jun 26, 2026. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 11:37
out of the model. Yeah, and much more, the business is not the model itself. It's actually everything around it. This idea of sovereign AI, you know, you had this merger with Aleph Alpha, I think what they, they're like 10%, you're sort of 90% of the business, German business, like, what is the idea of sovereign AI? And what countries are you sovereign to? And how do you think about sort of, yeah, nations?
- 12:00
needing to prefer companies that have some sort of affinity with them or local presence. Yeah, well, there's been this over the past 30 years. The world, and in particular, the part I care about, like the democratic alliance, the G7 or, you know, whatever you want to call it, it has basically consolidated to buying all of its technology from a very small set of players. And that is a really non-robust system.
- 12:34
It's not very resilient. It's a single point of failure. And like the first thing you learn... America is the single point of failure? Yeah. I say this is an American that wants to be on team democracy and worries about it. So I'm not saying that's a crazy point of view, but just America is sort of... A very small pool of these large tech players are becoming a single point of failure for the entire democratic bloc.
- 12:54
And that is not a resilient system, right? That is a single point of failure. And the first thing you learn as a computer scientist or engineer is don't build a single point of failure. So if you care about the democratic project, capability diffusion into the other G7 countries or into the broader democratic alliance is essential to resilience of democracy itself. If one goes down, you need to make sure you have backups.
- 13:20
And I think you've started to see a much greater appreciation of how important that is, how important digital sovereignty is, it was something that was taken for granted, right? Like, it'll always be here, you know, I'll always be able to rely on it. But with the export ban of Anthropix models, you saw that it can get pulled away from you. And so our, like, Cohere's pitch has always been deploying on the infrastructure of our customers, instead of saying, hey, send, you know, your data to me via an API, which I can switch off, and then you lose access. I think that has to be the model that's pursued for critical workloads, for other stuff, for startups, whatever, like use APIs, they're great. But for critical workloads, countries need to control the infrastructure that powers their economy, like telcos, like financial institutions, healthcare,
- 14:15
the grid, water treatment, defense. What countries does Cohere call home? Well, like with the merger with Aleph Alpha, we'll have a dual HQ between Toronto and Berlin.