The big picture: The competition over artificial intelligence will not be decided solely by capital, chips or algorithms, but by the ability to build trusted and integrated technology ecosystems. Roberto Baldoni and Len Khodorkovsky argue that democracies should respond to technological concentration not with autarky, but with alliances, common standards and verifiable trust.
Why it matters: The greatest risk of the AI race may not be who wins, but how that victory is achieved.
- That is the central argument of a recent Newsweek op-ed by Roberto Baldoni, former Deputy Director General of Italian Intelligence and founding Director General of Italy’s National Cybersecurity Agency (ACN), and Len Khodorkovsky, Senior Advisor to the Chairman of the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue and former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Digital Strategy.
The core tension: Democracies face two competing risks. On one side is the growing concentration of economic value, data and technological capabilities in the hands of a small number of AI models and technology platforms.
- On the other is the temptation for governments to respond by pursuing technological sovereignty through national self-sufficiency — potentially creating isolated, expensive and less competitive technology ecosystems.
The proposed answer: Baldoni and Khodorkovsky argue for “trusted technology” and “trusted interdependence.”
- The idea is not technological isolation, but deeper cooperation among allied countries, companies and institutions based on common standards, resilient supply chains and verifiable mechanisms of trust.
What’s happening: Pax Silica is one example of this emerging approach.
- At its Washington summit, 35 countries signed the Joint Statement on AI Opportunity, while the European Union’s participation strengthened the prospect of broader transatlantic alignment around AI and technology supply chains.
Reality check: No country independently controls all the resources required to compete in AI.
- Compute, advanced semiconductors, critical minerals, capital, energy, research and talent are distributed across countries and markets.
- Technological sovereignty, the authors argue, will therefore depend less on what a country owns than on the strength and reliability of the interdependencies it can build.
The next challenge: Trust must become measurable.
- Baldoni and Khodorkovsky argue that open, transparent and verifiable standards are needed to assess technology before it is integrated into critical systems.
- The goal is to avoid two forms of dependency: reliance on infrastructure controlled by authoritarian regimes and the emergence of a new form of “private sovereignty” exercised by dominant technology platforms.
The bottom line: The AI race will not be decided by compute, capital or algorithms alone.
- The advantage will go to the coalition capable of building the largest, most innovative and most integrated trusted technology ecosystem.
- For democracies, the strategic challenge is increasingly clear: turn political alliances and industrial complementarities into a common architecture of trust.
