AI, Surveillance, and the Fight for Digital Sovereignty | Near's Illia Polosukhin

Government export controls on advanced AI models, such as the recent restriction on Anthropic’s Fable, signal a shift toward the balkanization of the internet and the potential nationalization of AI labs. These measures force users into KYC-compliant, centralized systems, creating significant privacy risks and threatening individual autonomy. In response, decentralized AI architectures—such as those developed by NEAR—leverage confidential inference and verifiable compute to provide a resilient, user-owned alternative. By shifting the focus from top-down corporate alignment to individual-level sovereignty, these decentralized platforms ensure that AI agents remain aligned with user interests rather than institutional agendas. As compute becomes a bottleneck and regulatory pressure mounts, decentralized networks offer a necessary, cost-effective, and private substrate for the next generation of intelligence, effectively bypassing the constraints of nation-state boundaries.