A senior US official has cautioned countries against investing heavily to build complete domestic AI technology stacks in the name of digital sovereignty, saying innovation should take priority over duplicating technologies that already exist. The remarks also highlighted India as a critical partner in the global technology race.
Speaking at the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum Leadership Summit in Washington, US Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg said AI sovereignty should focus on contributing to global innovation rather than achieving complete in-house control of existing technologies.
“In my view, sovereignty comes from being a net contributor to the world’s innovation ecosystem. It is about innovation sovereignty, not just ‘do you control last year’s stack entirely in-house’,” Helberg said.
He warned that the concept of digital sovereignty is increasingly being interpreted in a way that encourages countries to rebuild entire AI technology stacks from scratch. According to him, this approach is economically inefficient and could divert valuable engineering talent and financial resources away from future innovation.
“The danger is that that concept is being weaponised by a number of different political voices overseas to be interpreted in a way that it really means we are going to rebuild in-house the entire stack top to bottom in order to be sovereign,” he said.
Helberg further added, “…because what that means is these countries are going to sink billions of dollars in resources to reinvent something that already exists. They will likely get massively suboptimal results. All of that engineering power, all of those dollars are resources that could be going towards building the next innovation, not towards getting a subpar version of last year’s innovations.”
Highlighting India’s growing role in global technology, Helberg described the country as an “indispensable” partner for the US. He said India has one of the world’s largest engineering talent pools, a rapidly expanding technology ecosystem and is making significant contributions at the AI application layer, which is essential for wider technology adoption.
His remarks reinforced the importance of innovation-led collaboration while positioning India as a key player in shaping the future of global AI development.
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