Who governs the machine that governs: AI sovereignty and the new global divide

ON 29 September, OpenAI unveiled “always-on” autonomous agents designed not merely to answer prompts but to pursue goals across applications. With that, AI has crossed from a technology of assistance and content creation into an infrastructure of delegated agency, and the world is scrambling to decide how to regulate its risks, constrain its excesses and assign responsibility for its decisions.

However, while many institutions still approach governance largely as a software issue, the challenge reaches much deeper, into the political economy that determines who owns the models, commands the infrastructure, allocates the capital, sets standards, retains expertise and, ultimately, preserves human agency.