Why it matters: Jacob Helberg is the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and the architect of the Pax Silica initiative. His latest manifesto against the U.N.’s vision of “digital sovereignty” is more than an opinion piece on AI governance. Read alongside this week’s Pax Silica summit in Washington, it offers the clearest articulation yet of how the Trump administration wants to organize the West’s technological future: not through national self-sufficiency, but through trusted interdependence.
- The core of Helberg’s argument is straightforward. Countries that try to build every layer of an AI stack at home—from compute infrastructure to frontier models—are likely to spend enormous sums reproducing technologies that already exist elsewhere. The result, he argues, is duplication rather than innovation.
What he said: Published on June 23, Helberg’s essay landed just as Pax Silica, the U.S.-led initiative he helped design, moved into the spotlight during its Washington summit. The initiative aims to assemble a network of trusted partners across the AI supply chain, from semiconductors and critical minerals to energy and advanced manufacturing.
- Helberg’s target is the model of “digital sovereignty” promoted through U.N. initiatives on digital governance. In his view, treating technological sovereignty as the ability to replicate an entire national technology stack risks creating dozens of parallel ecosystems competing to build yesterday’s breakthroughs instead of tomorrow’s.
His alternative is what he calls “innovation sovereignty.” The distinction is more than semantic. A country, Helberg argues, is not sovereign because it can reproduce existing technologies. It is sovereign because it can contribute new ones. Competitive advantage comes not from rebuilding what already exists but from continuously generating new capabilities through research, entrepreneurship and industrial learning.
That argument reflects a broader shift in American industrial strategy. Washington has spent the past several years strengthening domestic technological capabilities. At the same time, it has increasingly moved away from the assumption that every segment of critical supply chains must be recreated inside the United States. The emphasis is instead on building a trusted ecosystem in which allies specialize according to their comparative strengths.
That is the logic behind Pax Silica. Rather than a technological fortress, it is conceived as a coalition of complementary capabilities. One partner contributes compute, another industrial manufacturing, another research, another critical minerals or energy infrastructure. The objective is integration, not duplication.
The timing is hardly accidental. During this week’s summit, Washington announced that Pax Silica would expand to 24 participants, adding new European partners — including the Netherlands, Germany, Greece and the EU — as well as countries from Latin America and Central Asia. The European Union also joined the initiative. Italy is not yet among the participants, although discussions about Rome’s possible future role have circulated for some time.
- Speaking to the Financial Times, Helberg explained the rationale behind the initiative in broader geopolitical terms: “There’s no grouping that’s purpose-built to manage the AI economy at a time when AI is revolutionising the shape of the global economy.”
- That helps explain why the administration sees Pax Silica not simply as another diplomatic forum, but as an institutional answer to a gap left by existing formats such as the G7 and G20.
The broader message is directed at America’s allies. Much of Europe continues to frame technology policy around the concept of “digital sovereignty.” Washington increasingly appears to be asking a different question: what unique contribution can each ally make to a shared technology ecosystem?
The difference reshapes industrial policy itself. Instead of encouraging dozens of national champions to develop similar technologies, the objective becomes identifying complementary specializations while building trusted strategic interdependence across the alliance.
- Viewed through that lens, the ongoing U.S.-Italy dialogue on Trusted Technologies takes on broader significance.
- The initiative—organized by Roberto Baldoni, Senior Advisor on Technology and Cybersecurity Policy to the Italian Ambassador to the United States, together with the Krack Institute of Tech Diplomacy and the SERICS Foundation—is less about bilateral cooperation than about defining Italy’s place inside an emerging Western technology architecture.
The underlying question is not simply how to coordinate research or industrial policy. It is how each trusted partner can create the greatest value within a shared ecosystem while preserving control over strategically sensitive technologies and reducing dependence on systemic competitors.
- Whether this vision can coexist with Europe’s ambitions for strategic autonomy remains an open debate.
- Many European governments continue to view domestic technological capacity as essential for reducing external dependencies. Helberg turns that argument on its head. The greater vulnerability, he suggests, lies in spending scarce resources replicating technologies others already produce instead of investing in the next generation of innovation—the one that ultimately creates lasting strategic advantage.
To the point. That is precisely where initiatives such as the U.S.-Italy Trusted Technologies dialogue may prove increasingly relevant.
- If Pax Silica evolves into the organizing framework for American technology diplomacy, these bilateral and minilateral partnerships could become the mechanisms through which Washington translates its strategy into practical cooperation with trusted allies.
The bottom line: Helberg’s essay is best understood not as a critique of the U.N.’s digital agenda, but as a blueprint for a new Western technology order. In that vision, competitiveness will depend less on national technological self-sufficiency than on occupying an indispensable position inside a trusted innovation ecosystem.
(Photo: X, @UnderSecE)
