- Professor Richard Holden warns that building sovereign AI in Australia is “illusory,” but CEO Simon Kriss counters that this is not a race against OpenAI or Google, but about ensuring national strategic infrastructure.
- The government should not directly develop foundational AI models but needs to support localized AI projects to ensure data sovereignty and Australian ethical values.
- Comparison with defense: Australia cannot “outcompete” the US or China militarily but still maintains an independent army – a similar logic applies to AI.
- Sovereign AI is not about grandiosity but about protecting Australians’ data, privacy, and ethical standards.
- Currently, Australians use imported AI in healthcare, education, finance – without knowing what training data the models contain, how it was collected, or how exposed it is.
- Image comparison: using foreign AI is like building a house on a neighbor’s foundation – it might be fine initially, but when something goes wrong, you don’t know how to fix it because you don’t control the foundation.
- Billions of dollars are not needed: China built the DeepSeek model with only about $6 – $30 million. A powerful AI model for Australia could cost less than $100 million – a completely feasible amount.
- Simon Kriss and Troy Neilson have just founded Sovereign Australia AI, the country’s largest sovereign AI project, investing in an NVIDIA B200 GPU cluster and spending $10 million to compensate owners of training data copyrights.
- The goal is transparency, fairness, and the protection of Australian values. Sensitive areas like healthcare, where LLMs are used to record medical records, clearly need a domestic model to prevent personal data leakage abroad.
- The use of LLMs is widespread everywhere – from banks to hospitals, law firms to customer service centers. Without domestic models, Australia loses control of its core technological infrastructure.
📌 Building sovereign AI in Australia is not far-fetched but a vital requirement to protect data, ethics, and national interests. With a cost of under $100 million, Australia can create a reliable LLM model, independent of foreign companies, especially in sensitive areas like healthcare and legal. Sovereign Australia AI is a pioneering step, investing in infrastructure and compensating data owners, bringing transparency and trust.
