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