Who Controls Your AI? A Conversation Between Maxim Oreshkin and Ankush Sabharwal

Artificial intelligence is becoming a new world's infrastructure. And this raises an uncomfortable question: if the technologies used by millions of people every day are developed and controlled outside their country, who really owns the data, platforms and rules of the game?

Ankush Sabharwal, creator of BharatGPT, believes that every country needs its own sovereign AI. But that does not mean building a huge language model and shutting oneself off from the rest of the world. In India, AI is already helping people buy railway tickets, interact with government services, choose insurance policies and understand financial risks. Sabharwal suggests treating it almost like electricity and water — as a technology that should be accessible to everyone.

Maxim Oreshkin, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office of the Russian Federation, approaches the issue from a different angle. A country can have its own models, energy, computing capacity and even data, yet still lose its technological sovereignty if someone else controls the key platforms and services.

So where is the line between cooperation and dependence? Does every country need to build its own AI? Which technologies can be bought from others, and which must never be surrendered to anyone? And why might the most valuable asset in this race turn out to be neither data centres nor models, but the people who understand how it all works?

Ankush Sabharwal and economist Maxim Oreshkin discuss who will control the AI of the future — and why this battle has already begun.