AI, Surveillance, and the Fight for Digital Sovereignty | Near's Illia Polosukhin

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. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast 🧭OKX | TRADE, EARN, PAY to OKX | 120M+ USERS WORLDWIDE https://app.okx.com/join/USBANKLESS 🦊 METAMASK | DOWNLOAD NOW https://go.metamask.io/BL-Pod-Download 🌐BRIX | EMERGING MARKET YIELD https://bankless.cc/brix 📊BITGET | TOKENIZED STOCKS 2.0 https://bankless.cc/bitget-stocks 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless --- 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 --- RESOURCES Illia Polosukhin https://x.com/ilblackdragon Near Protocol https://www.near.org/ --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures