The Rapid Emergence of National AIs

The president of South Korea was recently in San Francisco and shook hands with Nvidia's Jensen Huang over an agreement to develop a large language model for South Korea, something they are simply calling Korea AI.

[photo from The Korea Herald https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10819850 ]

This is a fascinating development that you may have missed.

250 years ago, hundreds of governments were creating constitutions. This was a new kind of technology that answered the question, If we are not our sovereign's country - if we are not simply Catherine the Great - Queen of Russia's - domain but are instead a nation that is defined as something that transcends a monarch - what are we? A constitution is an attempt to answer that question.

And of course constitutions evolve over time - most clearly with amendments but more subtly with hundreds of court rulings, laws, and emergent norms. But Korea AI represents something new: an emergent tool that has the capacity to synthesize polls, precedents, budgets, scientific and research discoveries, the evolution of culture and so much more into something we might call Korean.
This is not unique to Korea. How many countries are engaged in creating their own national AI?

If the bar is "formal national commitment to AI sovereignty," the figure is startling: at the AI for Developing Countries Forum in Bangkok in February 2026, delegates from over 100 countries adopted a declaration to pursue AI sovereignty — control over AI data, computing resources, and the models operating within their borders — explicitly so that models reflect each nation's "languages, cultures, and values." If the bar is "actually building or funding a national model," the realistic count is somewhere in the range of 30 to 40 countries with concrete programs, and it's now a budget line in most of the G20 — a stated strategic priority of essentially every government with the fiscal capacity to fund one.

Korea's announcement, in other words, isn't an outlier — it's one of the last major economies to formalize what has become, in about thirty months, a near-universal ambition.

In a sense, this is an attempt to formalize a national culture: its mix of capabilities and knowledge and its values and goals.
An American AI suggests the possibility of synthesizing culture into laws and budgets. The cultural debates about what we mean by British or German or even European give way to an elaborate scorecard that has the potential to synthesize debates from talk shows, public opinion, research from universities and - of course - legislation debated and passed into laws and budgets. The emergent property of a nation can become intellectual engine to an American AI or Colombian AI.

Among the many questions this raises is simply this: is this more or less democratic? A consciousness that emerges out of the various sometimes harmonious sometimes clashing impulses, thoughts and goals in the same way that a sense of self emerges out of target weight and the allure of chocolate, goals and priorities expressed versus goals and priorities lived, etc. Is this sense of Korea AI or America AI something transcendent of the old media and legislature or does it represent something too opaque to qualify as democratic?