On June 4, Canada released its national AI strategy, AI for All. It is built on three priorities, trust, opportunity, and sovereignty, and the sovereignty piece is the part I keep thinking about. The plan funds sovereign compute, aims to keep Canadian data and compute inside the country, and requires that federally supported AI infrastructure be operated under Canadian control and Canadian law. I think that is the right direction.

The models most of us are coming to depend on are run by a small number of providers, almost all of them outside Canada. Access to them can change with a decision we have no part in, and the data we send for inference leaves our control the moment it goes over the wire. We have seen a version of this before. A decade ago we asked whether it was wise to put everything on a few cloud providers. The AI version of that question feels bigger, because it is not only where our data sits, it is which models we are allowed to use and on what terms.

Canada is not making this move alone. The EU released its own Tech Sovereignty Package the day before, built on the same diagnosis of too much dependence on a handful of foreign cloud and AI providers, which tells me this is a structural shift and not a passing political mood.

A national strategy alone does not solve that. It needs Canadian companies building real alternatives, and that is the part that gives me some optimism. Cohere is the obvious example. They are taking a different approach to providing and running foundation models: open weights you can self-host, deployed in your own VPC, on premises, or fully air gapped, so the model and the data stay on infrastructure you control. That is a different posture from renting access to a model you cannot move, and it is the kind of capability a sovereign strategy depends on.

None of this means going it alone or cutting ourselves off. The strategy is explicit about partnering with allies, and most organizations will keep using hosted models for plenty of work. The point is having the option. Sovereignty here is not isolation. It is the ability to choose, and to substitute, when you need to.

I do not know how well Canada will execute. These plans are easier to announce than to deliver. But the direction is right, and it is good to see the policy and the companies starting to line up behind it. I am interested to see how it plays out.

Views my own.