The past week has been a lively one for the eternal battle between digital networks and national, sovereign security. After a two-year standoff, Elon Musk’s Starlink was able to reach deals with India’s #1 and #2 telecommunications companies, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, on providing satellite Internet to the subcontinent’s vast and underserved rural market. A few days earlier, Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt, and Alexander Wang — respectively, director of the nonprofit Center for AI Safety, former chairman of Google, and the CEO of Scale AI — released a paper , “Superintelligence Strategy,” arguing that no one state will ever be able to win the AI race.
In the first instance, a technology company with, it is fair to say, its own distinctive geopolitical interests could potentially gain a hold over the telecommunications of the world’s second largest national market. In the second instance, tech industry leaders with, particularly in the case of Schmidt, a strong record of advocating US technology dominance in competition with China are asserting that such dominance can never be complete. Indian digital sovereignty and US digital sovereignty are rendered highly problematic if not impossible. If a state is on the networks, as all powerful states are and will be, then their sovereignty is inherently partial. Taking these two major developments together, the future of digital self-determination can be seen to be rather weak. In SIG’s view, this represents an overdue recognition of the interdependence of states even as they engage in fierce geopolitical competition.
Reliance Jio has, in the past five years, revolutionized India’s telecommunications, particularly mobile communications, bringing huge numbers of Indians online. Bharti Airtel has done a surprisingly good job at catching up, giving Reliance Jio much-needed competition. The Indian state has not been idly observing these developments. Its vigorous advocacy of an indigenous digital infrastructure, often now referred to as the “India Stack,” has become an example to others, including the European Union. (See the SIGnal post “The America Stack,” Feb. 5, 2025.) India is determined to become a major tech power. It has also, with the world’s fourth-largest defense budget after the US, China, and Russia, aggressively advanced its own space program and its own space-based navigational system to rival GPS (US), Glonass (Russia), and BeiDou (China). Balancing US and Chinese telecommunications majors over the past decade-plus, India has artfully and purposefully pursued its desire to achieve digital self-determination.
That made the Starlink deal a surprise. It appears to have been hammered out between Musk and Indian President Narendra Modi during the latter’s recent visit to Washington. The Indian government has an interest in nurturing Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, but it also has an interest in good relations with the US under President Donald Trump and in making sure that neither Reliance nor Airtel accumulates too much power domestically. Both the US and China have faced a similar problematic in simultaneously backing and controlling their own tech majors. The deal with SpaceX, Starlink’s parent company, provides one way for India to meet these several challenges. Indian reaction to the Starlink deal has been understandably wary and somewhat confused. After all, the Indian government, at various junctures, has humbled Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Huawei, and ZTE, among other foreign firms eager to reach the Indian market. A recent Indian report characterized Starlink as “a technology of geopolitical control,” pointing meaningfully to Starlink’s role as the guarantor and master of Ukraine’s Internet access in that country’s struggle with Russia.
SIG’s view is that Starlink will not be able to repeat its Ukraine dominance in India, any more than its US and Chinese rivals have been able to subdue the subcontinent — not for want of trying. It is nonetheless striking that Modi, Reliance, and Airtel — the latter two have long opposed letting Starlink into the tent — now believe that the advantages of working with SpaceX outweigh the disadvantages. At the very least, Musk has dramatically proved that having the ear of the US president provides enormous business benefits.
While the “Superintelligence Strategy” has been in the works for some time, it is difficult not to read it in the context of the Trump administration’s declared determination to press the US’s AI dominance. One of Trump’s first moves was a $500 billion AI infrastructure project, and Vice President J.D. Vance later stressed in a landmark speech in Paris that the US “will ensure that American AI technology continues to be the gold standard worldwide and we are the partner of choice for others — foreign countries and certainly businesses — as they expand their own use of AI.” Vance held back from a simple declaration of hegemony but the administration’s message has clearly been that US AI should indefinitely be the parent in comparison to the efforts of other nations, especially China.
The “Superintelligence Strategy” has at its core the highly convincing argument that any large-scale AI system, even an American one, will always be vulnerable to infiltration and disruption by rivals. The strategy offers a very worldly solution, based on, but distinct from, earlier strategic arguments about nuclear weaponry. It is called Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM): the acceptance that there will be a balance of AI power, not a resolution or well-meaning regulation of it. Further, MAIM “already describes the strategic picture AI superpowers find themselves in.” A new Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), AI version, is already with us. As in the earlier, nuclear version, there can be no victors.
There is much here for China and others to digest. The old, US-led idea of a free and open Internet, so recently repudiated, can be seen as returning, but in a much darker form appropriate perhaps for darker times. How states and companies react is the crucial question for investors. The venerable commercial goal of scaling, ideally to a global level, is not going to be achievable. AI-fueled tech companies, which increasingly means most tech companies, will face geopolitical limits. Commercial cooperation within those limits — and successful digital competition is inherently commercial — seems to be the only way forward. Musk, Modi, and the authors of the “Superintelligence Strategy” are simply ahead of the curve, and showing the rest of us where it bends.