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AI, Surveillance, and the Fight for Digital Sovereignty | Near's Illia Polosukhin
Description
What happens when powerful AI requires an ID, governments can restrict access by country, and your most private data flows through centralized systems? NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin joins David to explain why AI export controls could fracture the internet, how nationalized AI could become a surveillance layer, and why decentralized, user-owned AI may be the only real alternative. They also unpack Ironclaw, confidential inference, private agents, and NEAR’s push to make AI and assets fully sovereign.
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
3:47 Pandora’s Box Opens
6:03 AI Meets Government
7:16 Decentralizing the Stack
8:51 Why Ban Fable?
11:18 Internet Balkanization
13:57 KYC for AI?
18:43 Nationalized Models
21:07 Building Private AI
26:30 Agent Marketplace
30:26 User-Owned Alignment
35:28 Winning Against Giants
40:19 Regulation Fuels Crypto
42:24 Global AI Adoption
45:05 Compute Is the Bottleneck
49:00 Enterprise Use Cases
51:39 Confidential TVL Explained
55:25 Full Sovereign Mode
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RESOURCES
Illia Polosukhin
Near Protocol
https://www.near.org/
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