Vietnam's Policy on AI Sovereignty

Nathan Gardels:

Vietnam is claiming 'AI Sovereignty':

"Who gets to define the terms of intelligence itself?

The stakes are stack-level choices — black-box dependence or modular improvisation; opacity or legibility; someone else’s roadmap or a sovereign design of your own … The decision is the difference between consuming intelligence as a service and composing it as an act of sovereignty. One rents a mind, the other trains its own in the wild.

“This is, in essence, a claim to AI sovereignty — the ability to build and govern infrastructures on Vietnam’s own terms while still enabling cross-border flows of data, talent and computation. AI sovereignty here does not mean isolation, but authorship — deciding which data, models and rules shape, and will shape, how machine intelligence is built and deployed."