'Sovereign AI' Has Become a New Front in the US-China Tech War OpenAI has announced "AI sovereignty partnerships with governments around the world, but can proprietary models compete with Beijing's open source offerings? OpenAI has announced a number of projects this year with foreign governments to help build out what it has called their "sovereign AI" systems. The company says the deals, some of which are being coordinated with the US government, are part of a broader push to give national leaders more control over a technology that could reshape their economies. Over the past few months, sovereign AI has become something of a buzzword in both Washington and Silicon Valley. Proponents of the concept argue it's crucial that AI systems developed in democratic nations are able to proliferate globally, particularly as China races to deploy its own AI technology abroad.

"Subjecting 5-year-olds to this technology will not make anyone safer, and we can't allow invasive surveillance to become the norm in our public spaces," said Stefanie Coyle, deputy director of the Education Policy Center for the New York Civil Liberties Union. "Reminding people of their greatest fears is a disappointing tactic, meant to distract from the fact that this product is discriminatory, unethical and not secure." The debate in Lockport has unfolded over nearly two years. The school district initially announced its plans to install a facial recognition security system, called Aegis, in March 2018. The district spent $1.4 million, with money it had been awarded by the state, to install the technology across 300 cameras.

We hear it said all the time, most recently in a national campaign for BT: "Technology will save us." The slogan was plastered on billboards across the country as part of BT's new advertising campaign, linked to a "UK-wide digital skills movement" developed partly with Google. The sentiment is so ubiquitous that it even led to a dispute with a startup of a similar name. But in an era dominated by the "big four" (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple) the idea that tech will save us rings hollow, an example of utopian messaging being used to conceal the simple pursuit of profit. Having proposed solutions to everything from food shortages to suicide prevention to climate breakdown, companies such as Google and Facebook – two of the leading western companies in the artificial intelligence arms race – claim there's almost nothing that cannot be tackled through tech.