The geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence: Technological Dependence and Digital Sovereignty in Developing States

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is becoming part of the way countries develop their economies, educate their populations and provide digital services. At the same time, the resources needed to build advanced AI systems are concentrated in a relatively small number of countries and companies. This creates an important question for developing states: how can they benefit from technologies developed abroad without becoming too dependent on decisions made outside their own borders? This paper examines this question through the case of Uzbekistan. It focuses on technological dependence and digital sovereignty and uses linguistic inequality in AI as one example of how this dependence may appear in practice. Particular attention is given to tokenization, the process through which text is divided into smaller units before it is processed by a language model. Research has shown that different languages can require very different numbers of tokens to communicate similar information, and that these differences can affect the cost and efficiency of commercial AI systems (Ahia et al., 2023). The paper argues that the Uzbek language should not be viewed only as a technical challenge for AI developers. Its relatively limited computational language resources also illustrate a wider issue: countries with smaller technological ecosystems may have less influence over the systems they increasingly use. The paper therefore considers digital sovereignty not as complete technological independence, but as the ability of a country to develop sufficient knowledge, infrastructure and partnerships to make informed decisions about technologies on which it relies. It also examines the role of UNESCO, international cooperation and regional collaboration in creating a more inclusive system of AI governance.