Quantum & AI Sovereignty Senior Advisor at Levio | Sovereign cloud, AI infrastructure & post-quantum security for governments | Co-chair, Global Data Pledge
Canada
Joined March 2009
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Rome. A table of nuclear-disarmament veterans. A finding has just landed: put an LLM in a nuclear escalation scenario and it raises the nuclear option ~9 times in 10, and recommends using a warhead ~7 in 10.
Then I told them I'd seen the thing they were theorising about. 🧵
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Regulate the pipeline — data, training, ranking, presentation — not the final click.
By the time the click exists, every meaningful decision has been made upstream.
And my dissent from the room: AI is not the principal preoccupation. The existence of the weapon is.
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The compression of decision time is the actual threat. It isn't reversed by putting a person in front of the screen.
It's reversed by deciding, in advance and in writing, which decisions may never be compressed.
Episode 4 of 9 → richardstpierre.com/mosaic-d…
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Rome, the morning after a reception. The night before I asked an African ambassador a blunt question: do you agree your country will never spend $500bn on AI, or anything close?
He agreed at once. Nobody from a small country is offended by that.
The German was. 🧵
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The instrument is already in the room. Public procurement in Europe: ~14% of GDP, over €2 trillion a year.
Nobody in the middle can match a hegemon's capex. Everybody in the middle has a procurement budget.
Coordinated demand is the weapon that doesn't require matching anyone.
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The failure mode is the talking shop: communiqués while the capacity gap widens.
The difference between a coalition and a communiqué is whether it builds shared infrastructure or shared positions.
Episode 3 of 9 → richardstpierre.com/mosaic-d…
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Rome. Across the table, a European tech investor who'd just opened a research centre in Beijing.
I explain an idea that sounds far-fetched the first time. Four sentences in, he finishes it for me:
"So you mean a Canadian embassy data centre in China."
Yes. Exactly. 🧵
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The right objection: a diplomatic note doesn't encrypt anything.
Correct. Legal status without technical detachability is theatre.
What makes it real: you hold the keys, you control the network path, you can run it yourself — and you can leave.
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Declaring that data centres can hold sovereign status is a stroke of a pen. An afternoon, a press conference.
Building the architecture that makes the declaration enforceable is three years nobody will write about.
Most countries will do the first part only.
Episode 2 of 9 → richardstpierre.com/mosaic-d…
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