AI Sovereignty and National Language Models

AI sovereignty ceased being a slogan from technology conferences.

Countries have begun treating language models, public data, and computing power as elements of critical infrastructure: similar to energy, telecommunications, and cybersecurity.

The issue is not whether every citizen will use a national equivalent of ChatGPT.

The issue is whether administration, courts, public health, and the security sector will be dependent on an external API that the country does not control.

In 2025, Linux Foundation described sovereign AI as a growing global trend in which control over data, models, infrastructure, and local cultural-legal adaptation is becoming an element of state strategy.

By 2026, this trend is already visible in practice: Canada is developing a sovereign computing infrastructure program, India is building access to a national GPU pool, Poland is developing the PLLuM family, and Ukraine is preparing a national LLM based on the open Gemma family.

What exactly does AI sovereignty mean?

AI sovereignty is the ability of a state or bloc of states to develop, implement, and control artificial intelligence systems in areas that are important for security, economy, and public services.