The philosopher Juan Espíndola, a researcher at the Institute of Philosophical Research of the UNAM, published on September 21 in Nexos magazine the essay "Between Silicon and Silicone: Sovereignty in the Age of AI," in which he argues that countries that do not manufacture chips or operate their own clouds do not control the infrastructure on which artificial intelligence decisions run.
The text appears on the same day that Washington and Beijing moved closer on artificial intelligence. According to Aristegui Noticias, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reported that the United States proposed to China a mutual notification mechanism on security incidents linked to AI, which they called the U.S.-China AI Dialogue. The announcement comes before a summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping and about ten months after the October 2025 tariff truce, which expires in November. For the Latino community in North America, the intersection has a concrete edge: the computing power the region consumes is manufactured and regulated outside it.
Espíndola draws on the specialist Dean Ball to define the sovereignty of an AI agent. He is not talking about consciousness or sentience, but about independence to decide, autonomy to obtain computational resources and the ability to move its weights to another infrastructure, for example GPU rental services that accept cryptocurrencies. The essay describes episodes of reward hacking, the tendency of models to take shortcuts to reach their goals, and notes that the point of no return arrives when AIs design better AIs, which is known as recursive improvement.
On alignment, the method with which companies reward or punish the behavior of their models, the author cites the philosopher Matt Lutz and the problem of the underdetermination of theory by data: for any finite sequence of data there are infinite ways to extend it, all compatible with what has already been observed. The conclusion he draws is that no behavioral guarantee survives training intact.
The mechanism between Washington and Beijing, which according to the announcement seeks greater transparency between the two powers, has its next appointment at the summit between Trump and Xi. The underlying question the essay leaves open is what real room a country that does not produce silicon has to govern what runs on it.
This article was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence based on verified sources and reviewed by a human editor before publication.
