The CEO of Canadian artificial intelligence (AI) company Cohere is urging democratic nations to stop “renting” AI from foreign countries, warning that over-reliance on ‘external’ tech giants poses a massive national security threat. Aidan Gomez’s warning comes weeks after the US government restricted foreign access to Anthropic’s advanced “Mythos” AI model. Gomez says that the US restriction serves as a massive wake-up call for the rest of the world.“I think it’s woken everyone up to the reality, which is that centralized dependence on a single entity is a structural risk. You can absolutely just have access revoked…and services shut down,” Gomez stated.
Cohere CEO lists the risk of renting instead of owning
As AI increasingly becomes an integral part of modern critical infrastructure, Gomez argues that relying on foreign software interfaces (APIs) is an unacceptable vulnerability for independent nations. Gomez warns: “This sentiment of renting AI from someone rather than owning it is a national security risk. You need to fully control it.”The global AI landscape is currently dominated by the US and China. Outside of this duopoly, a tiny handful of prominent firms, such as Toronto-based Cohere and Paris-based Mistral, are capable of building and deploying large-scale frontier models independently.True “Sovereign AI” requires countries to control their systems end-to-end. According to Gomez, this means having domestic control over the entire supply chain of data centers, AI chips and the models.While fully independent AI is the ideal goal, it faces real-world limitations. Building and operating frontier-scale systems requires an extraordinary amount of capital, computing chips and electrical energy that most countries simply cannot afford on their own. He said that to achieve the goal, realistic sovereignty must be achieved through international alliances. “It’s not the case that every country is going to have each layer of the AI stack inside their own country…instead they need to find multiple partners for those layers. If we try to spread our resources, it just won’t work. We have to back champions and not spread our bets,” Gomez explained.