Access alone isn’t sovereignty: what a new UN report makes clear

Florian Douetteau’s AI Sovereignty Manifesto and a UN ODET/UNU Macau/ADB report on AI as a digital public good both argue that access to AI systems does not by itself provide independence, public value, or meaningful control. The manifesto frames sovereignty across infrastructure, capability, and economic layers, while the UN research finds that open models may remain unusable or ungovernable without compute resources, adaptable data, documentation, institutional capacity, accountability, and local oversight. Both perspectives challenge simplified debates that equate openness, geographic location, compliance, or cloud choice with sovereignty, emphasizing instead whether institutions can deploy, understand, adapt, audit, replace, and govern AI systems as conditions change. The report recommends viewing openness in degrees through the Model Openness Framework and highlights citizen representation, alongside standards, accountability, finance, and equity, as central to public-interest AI governance. The piece concludes that resilient AI use depends on preserving leverage and avoiding provider lock-in, citing Dataiku’s LLM Mesh and Kiji Privacy Proxy as tools intended to support model flexibility and oversight.

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