Renting AI from foreign providers is a national security risk, warns Cohere CEO

Aidan Gomez, CEO of Canadian AI company Cohere, has spent years planning for the possibility that foreign governments might abruptly cut off access to frontier AI models. Earlier this month, when the U.S. government moved to restrict foreign access to Anthropic’s Mythos, it was a striking example of exactly what he’d been warning about. “I think it’s woken everyone up to the reality, which is that centralized dependence on a single entity is a structural risk,” he told Fortune. “You can absolutely just have access revoked…and services shut down.” The U.S. has largely led the global AI race since it began, controls vast amounts of the world’s AI computing power, and is home to the majority of leading frontier labs. China is its closest rival, and together the pair hold 90% of the world’s computing power, according to data from AI research firm Epoch AI. Outside the two nations, the field of frontier AI developers is more narrow: Cohere, founded in Toronto in 2019, and Paris-based Mistral are among the only prominent companies building and deploying large-scale models from outside the U.S.-China axis. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in critical systems, such as hospitals, financial markets, military logistics, and public services, the question of who controls that technology and who can switch it off is becoming a matter of national strategy. Gomez argues that democracies need to stop renting critical AI from a handful of foreign providers and instead build sovereign systems they can control end‑to‑end. In practice, that means owning or have some control over the full chain of components an AI system depends on: the data centers, the chips inside them, and the models themselves, rather than paying another country’s company for access to those things via an API (the software interface that lets you tap into someone else’s model over the internet). “This sentiment of renting AI from someone rather than owning it is a national security risk,” G