Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
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Cyberwarfare / Nation-State Attacks
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Fraud Management & Cybercrime
Atlantic Council’s Ray on How Geopolitics, Technology, Power Collide in the AI Era
The global race for artificial intelligence leadership has opened up a new front: AI sovereignty. Countries are realizing that their digital futures might rely less on data innovation and more on independence from a few large technology companies or nations.
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“Sovereign AI isn’t just a buzzword; it’s a wake-up call for governments around the world,” said Trisha Ray, associate director and resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center. “It’s about making sure that a nation can build and control AI systems with its own infrastructure, data and talent, not someone else’s.”
“Sovereign AI is no longer just a theoretical idea. It is now a crucial issue concerning national power, trust and resilience,” she said.
But this path, she cautioned, is filled with difficulties including a lack of diverse, high-quality datasets and the undigitized status of hundreds of thousands of languages. These gaps hinder many countries from creating truly inclusive and effective AI models.
In this video interview with Information Security Media Group, Ray also discussed:
- Who owns AI and the four possible futures for national AI ecosystems;
- The building blocks of AI sovereignty: data, compute and talent;
- How the geopolitics of AI are reshaping global power, trust and cooperation.
Ray’s research investigates the intersection of geopolitical and security trends in relation to emerging technologies. Before joining the Atlantic Council, she was a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in India, focusing on AI governance, data protection and cybersecurity. She also chaired ORF’s flagship technology conference, CyFy.

