DUBAI: Across three days of rigorous debate at the World Government Summit in Dubai, experts from some of the world’s largest tech and telecommunication companies debated what the future political landscape of artificial intelligence development would be.

Speaking at the summit on Thursday, e& group CEO Hatem Dowidar said there was increasing pressure to choose between the Chinese and US ecosystems, which could have impacts on the sovereign capabilities of countries, like Gulf Cooperation Council member states, which thus far have stayed in the middle.

“I think the fracture and the pressure today is if you use this technology, you cannot use the other. You must separate them completely and this is something that never happened before,” Dowidar said.

He warned that whilst people around the world currently have access to both the leading large language models in the US and China, ChatGPT and Deepseek, this would not always be the case, and middle powers would need to develop their own capability to maintain their sovereignty.

“Europe is trying to find its own way as well, because Europe — having been caught now in the middle — they don’t have platforms, they don’t have the data center capability,” he said.

“So now, Europe is focusing a lot on building sovereign capability, sovereign data centers to run AI applications within Europe.”

Dowidar said the GCC had been ahead of the curve in this regard, having worked out early on that sovereign capability would be necessary in the new multipolar world and subsequently investing heavily in local infrastructure and capability.

“We were lucky here in the region that already — I would say a couple of years ago —we have kind of ironed out how this works,” he said.

“I think that everyone will try to see how they can either utilize the global platforms in a sovereign manner, or they end up trying to push to develop their own platforms.” 

This sentiment was echoed by Chamath Palihapitiya, the founder and managing partner of Social Capital, who said that China’s dedication to open-source models — whose code is released under a license granting users rights to view, study, modify, and redistribute it freely — could make Chinese AI more popular in the long run for nations looking to keep some level of sovereignty.

“I do think that there are a handful of American open-source models that are quite good. I think Nvidia’s models are excellent. But in fairness, the Chinese open-source models are just superb,” he told the summit on Wednesday.

“It’s going to be important for every country to make their own decisions about their own sovereignty, and in that realm, I think the open-source models provide the clearest path, because it just gives you total transparency to what’s happening underneath the hood.”

This was reiterated by Joseph Tsai, the chairman and co-founder of Alibaba Group, who said Chinese open-source systems would be favored by middle powers — but warned they had yet to find a way to be economically self-sufficient. 

“Because countries care about the sovereignty aspect and care about their data privacy, you can take an open-source model and deploy it on your own infrastructure … giving you ownership and control” he said.

“But it remains to be seen how economically all the model companies are going to make it sort of sustainable with an open-source approach … This is the biggest challenge for the Chinese firms.”