Published in Newsweek

The greatest risk of the AI era may not be who wins the race, but how it is won.

Two influential voices in technology policy have recently highlighted opposite sides of the same strategic problem. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned that “the last thing any of us want is a world where every company across every sector is ceding value to a few models that eat everything they see.” Under Secretary of State Jacob Helberg, the architect of Pax Silica, cautioned that nations pursuing “digital sovereignty” through autarkic national AI stacks will march themselves into the past.

Together, they expose the same paradox: AI cannot remain both innovative and democratic if value concentrates on a handful of platforms or fragments into isolated and substandard national tech stacks.

This dilemma has already moved from theory into diplomacy. At the Pax Silica Summit in Washington, 35 nations signed the Joint Statement on AI Opportunity, endorsing trusted alliances and resilient AI supply chains. The EU’s participation extended the Pax Silica vision into a shared transatlantic alignment. For the first time, a broad coalition of countries is organizing around a common technological agenda rather than disparate strategies.

The emerging consensus points to a new doctrine: trusted technology. Technology is not value-neutral. It reflects the incentives, institutions and values of those who finance, design, manufacture, and govern it. The nations that shape standards, supply chains and adoption will determine whether AI expands freedom or coercion.

Trusted technology is technology whose design, development and supply chains are rooted in democratic principles that advance both freedom and innovation. Its adoption creates accountable, contestable and governable interdependence among trusted partners rather than opaque or coercive dependency. As Roberto Viola, Director-General of the European Commission’s DG CONNECT, observed: “Tech sovereignty doesn’t mean tech isolation. It means being proactive on innovation and knowing who your friends and allies are and where the danger lies.”

This distinction matters because sovereignty concerns are legitimate. Governments are right to care about operational continuity, jurisdiction, resilience, and strategic autonomy. The answer is not self-imposed technological isolation but trusted interdependence: the ability to rely confidently on trusted partners without becoming strategically vulnerable. In the AI era, sovereignty will be measured less by what a nation owns than by what it can trust.

Democracies face two simultaneous vulnerabilities. Upstream, authoritarian actors that shape design standards first can normalize surveillance and control before alternatives emerge. Downstream, authoritarian-controlled infrastructure can transform market success into geopolitical leverage, limiting freedom through dependency rather than confrontation. The Clean Network proved in 2020 that democracies can close both flanks. By aligning 60 countries and more than 200 telcos around trusted suppliers, it reshaped the global trajectory of 5G.

As Helberg has argued, the U.S. did not build a domestic 5G champion. It relied on trusted allies and innovated on the layer above. Nadella’s vision of “a distributed frontier ecosystem” similarly keeps institutional knowledge within organizations rather than concentrating it in a few foundation models. Although they operate at different levels—one geopolitical, the other organizational—both depend on the ability of independent actors to collaborate across shared infrastructures. That, in turn, requires a common framework for trusted collaboration.

This is why trust cannot simply remain a political aspiration. It must become measurable. The Global Trusted Tech Standard (xGTT), developed by the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue, is one emerging answer. It acts as a trust layer—a verifiable, interoperable tool for evaluating not only technical competence but democratic governance. Ultimately, xGTT gives governments, enterprises, and developers a clear way to ensure technology is truly trustworthy before integrating it into critical systems.

A standard alone, however, is not enough. What democracies need is democratic coupling: the deliberate integration of markets, institutions and capabilities so trusted partners can combine compute, minerals, capital, research and talent without renegotiating trust at every transaction.

The building blocks of this vision are already emerging. A Pax Silica AI Assistance Project for Panama is developing an AI supply-chain credentialing and provenance platform to verify the origin and integrity of semiconductors, critical minerals and AI infrastructure moving through one of the world’s most strategic logistics hubs. Likewise, the G7’s emerging Software Bill of Materials for AI is transforming transparency across models, datasets, infrastructure and security components into a practical instrument for trusted deployment across allied markets.

The private sector is moving in the same direction. The Trusted Tech Alliance—bringing together industry-leading companies like Microsoft, Google Cloud, AWS, Anthropic, Ericsson, Nokia, NTT, and others—signals that industry increasingly recognizes trust as a competitive asset rather than merely a compliance obligation.

Yet private leadership alone cannot define trust. As Palantir CEO Alex Karp asked: "Are we really going to outsource the battlefield of this country to the consensus view in Silicon Valley?" The question applies beyond the battlefield. Karp warned that enterprises, too, are possibly surrendering proprietary data and competitive advantage to the very platforms they depend on. On both levels—national security and commercial—when tech giants are so dominant that they can define trust, public sovereignty is at risk of being replaced by private sovereignty. To mitigate this, any trusted technology standard must remain open, transparent, contestable, and independently assessable.

The geopolitical environment is also becoming more favorable. The European Union’s participation in Pax Silica, together with regulatory simplification and renewed industrial policy, signals a stronger emphasis on innovation. At the same time, the United States is complementing market dynamism with targeted governance for frontier AI. Both sides of the Atlantic are converging on a common insight: verifiable accountability is a prerequisite for technological leadership. Similar trust-centered approaches are emerging in Japan, South Korea, and Singapore.

The AI race will not be decided solely by compute, capital or algorithms. It will be decided by which coalition builds the most innovative and large trusted technology ecosystem. The free world already has many of the pieces. What it still lacks is the awareness to assemble them into a coherent technological architecture and the connective tissue to turn that architecture into a strategic advantage: Trusted technology provides the doctrine. Trusted interdependence supplies the strategy. Democratic coupling delivers the scale. A global trust standard is that connective tissue that transforms trusted partners into a unified market powerhouse.

Roberto Baldoni is former Deputy Director General of Italian Intelligence and the founding Director General of the National Cybersecurity Agency (ACN).

Len Khodorkovsky is the Senior Advisor to the Chairman of the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue. He previously served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Digital Strategy.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.