DeepSeek’s Disruption: Digital “Sovereignty” Meets Reality at the Paris AI Summit
As policymakers and tech luminaries descend on Paris for next week’s AI Action Summit, they are already finding their carefully crafted agenda upended by an unexpected gatecrash: DeepSeek.
The Chinese firm claims to have developed a large language model rivaling the best American offerings, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, at a fraction of the usual cost. Chinese AI innovation has not merely disrupted the Summit’s choreography—it has called into question fundamental assumptions about digital sovereignty: the latest geopolitical battlefield where nations compete for control over AI capabilities, data flows, and technological infrastructure just as they once fought over physical trade routes.