AI, Surveillance, and the Fight for Digital Sovereignty | Near's Illia Polosukhin
June 23, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readAI, Surveillance, and the Fight for Digital Sovereignty
Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of Near Protocol, argues that the central tension in AI today is not about capability but about control—specifically, who gets to decide what you can ask an AI model, who gets to see your data, and whether the internet remains a borderless resource. The episode opens with a concrete trigger: Anthropic released a model that was "neutered" on certain topics like cryptography and bioscience, then changed its privacy policy to retain user data even for paying customers who opted out. Shortly after, the US government imposed export controls on AI models, effectively restricting access by geography. For Polosukhin, this sequence reveals a pattern: governments and centralized labs are quietly deciding how you can use AI, which amounts to "policing the thoughts, not policing the actions."
The Precedent That Changes Everything
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:10) **The Pandora's Box of AI is Open** - Illia argues that export controls on frontier models set a dangerous precedent and that open-source models matching current frontier capability will arrive within 3-6 months regardless.
- 2 (03:39) **Export Controls as a Bad Precedent** - The government's reaction to safety issues is framed as poor game theory that erodes trust in US technology globally.
- 3 (05:35) **Crypto's Mindset is Now Mainstream** - The crypto industry's assumption of an intelligent adversary is becoming the necessary worldview for society.
- 4 (07:29) **The Balkanization of the Internet** - The export control precedent pushes the world toward a fragmented internet where every government wants its own sovereign AI, mirroring the current state of fiat currencies.
- 5 (09:57) **The Threat of KYC and Nationalized AI** - Illia predicts a likely path toward full nationalization of AI labs, which would require KYC for all users and turn every interaction into surveilled data.
- 6 (11:57) **The Need for User-Owned AI** - Web3 is uniquely positioned to build a decentralized AI stack where data belongs to the user, is verifiable, and requires no KYC.
- 7 (13:10) **The Iron Claw Agent Framework** - Illia introduces Iron Claw as a verifiable, confidential harness for AI agents that protects user data and actions.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
What happens when powerful AI requires an ID, governments can restrict access by country, and your most private data flows through centralized systems? NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin joins David to explain why AI export controls could fracture the internet, how nationalized AI could become a surveillance layer, and why decentralized, user-owned AI may be the only real alternative. They also unpack Ironclaw, confidential inference, private agents, and NEAR’s push to make AI and assets fully sovereign.
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
3:47 Pandora’s Box Opens
6:03 AI Meets Government
7:16 Decentralizing the Stack
8:51 Why Ban Fable?
11:18 Internet Balkanization
13:57 KYC for AI?
18:43 Nationalized Models
21:07 Building Private AI
26:30 Agent Marketplace
30:26 User-Owned Alignment
35:28 Winning Against Giants
40:19 Regulation Fuels Crypto
42:24 Global AI Adoption
45:05 Compute Is the Bottleneck
49:00 Enterprise Use Cases
51:39 Confidential TVL Explained
55:25 Full Sovereign Mode
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RESOURCES
Illia Polosukhin