Yury Maksimov: Building digital sovereignty requires a new model of international cooperation

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Digitalisation has become one of the main drivers of the global changes taking place today in the economy, society and every individual’s life. Digital sovereignty is therefore becoming one of the key issues shaping the future of countries and international cooperation. Yury Maksimov, co-founder of the Cyberus Foundation and Positive Technologies, discussed this at the National Centre RUSSIA. During the Summer Expert Meetings of the Open Dialogue "The Future of the World. A New Platform for Global Growth", Maksimov explained what technological sovereignty means today and how countries can achieve it.

According to the co-founder of the Cyberus Foundation, a country’s digital sovereignty is determined by its ability to create and maintain digital systems, ensure their security and retain control over them.

"When we talk about sovereignty, we often mean the ability to build digital systems, even when someone is trying to prevent us from doing so. But digital sovereignty also means that a country’s life cannot be brought to a halt through digital means," Yury Maksimov emphasised.

At the same time, he said, attempts by individual countries to create their own digital infrastructure from scratch are a dead end, involving enormous costs and beyond the reach of all but a handful of countries. Yury Maksimov believes that it would be far more effective to develop global cooperation around a shared goal: building a new global digital architecture that guarantees countries security and sovereignty.

Such an architecture should ensure that technologies are interchangeable and allow every country to contribute to common development while retaining autonomy and control over critical processes, even if individual countries are unable to develop all the necessary technologies themselves.

"Not every country will be able to build its own digital infrastructure. We therefore need to structure the digitalisation of the world in such a way that every country retains its digital sovereignty even if it is unable to create that infrastructure itself. This requires cooperation," Maksimov said.

The development of artificial intelligence could provide one example of this approach. Countries do not necessarily need to spend vast sums on creating their own large language models. They can use open models whose data can be inspected and used for further training, while also creating small "arbiter systems" capable of detecting manipulation and overseeing the operation of large models.

"The most important thing is not to try to buy sovereignty directly. For example, creating your own neural network with your own dataset and training it to the standard of the world’s leading models costs an enormous amount of money. Does every country need to do this? Perhaps not," Maksimov added.

Yury Maksimov also emphasised that full cooperation is possible only among autonomous actors capable of making decisions and participating in global politics and the economy on an equal footing: "If we want to live in a better world, our task is to ensure that not only we but other countries also possess sovereignty," he noted.

This approach opens up extensive opportunities for international cooperation and the creation of a kind of "Cyber UN", a platform where countries could agree on common rules for the development and use of digital technologies.

Yury Maksimov, co-founder of the Cyberus Foundation and Positive Technologies, took part in the Summer Expert Meetings of the Open Dialogue at the National Centre RUSSIA on 17 July. He spoke during the session on globalisation and technological sovereignty.

The Open Dialogue "The Future of the World. A New Platform for Global Growth" is an international project of the National Centre RUSSIA, organised in partnership with the Centre for Cross-Industry Expertise "The Third Rome" and supported by the Presidential Executive Office of Russia. By decision of the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, the event is now held annually.