Here’s what’s happening right now with artificial intelligence: A handful of giant corporations are seizing control of the most transformative technology of our era, making unilateral decisions about who gets access, how much it costs, and what purposes it serves. This approach is fundamentally backwards.
AI should function as a public resource accessible to all citizens, not as a private commodity reserved for the wealthy and well-connected. Two democracies demonstrate how to get this balance right.
Switzerland’s Public Infrastructure Model
Switzerland approaches AI the same way America once approached the interstate highway system or the early internet: as essential public infrastructure designed to serve the common good.
The Swiss government is developing a comprehensive multilingual language model built on principles of complete transparency. They are making the model weights, training methodologies, and evaluation data freely available to researchers and the public. This represents a deliberate rejection of the corporate secrecy that dominates today’s AI landscape.
This model is designed to serve more than 1,000 languages, a conscious effort to prevent English-speaking technology giants from determining which voices get heard in our increasingly digital world. The Swiss approach prioritizes long-term democratic access to the tools that will shape our collective future over short-term profit maximization. This mirrors their earlier success with CERN, the particle physics laboratory that eventually gave us the World Wide Web.
Australia’s Sovereignty-First Approach
Australia has chosen a different strategy that arrives at a similar destination: democratic control over AI infrastructure. Rather than developing indigenous models, Australia launched a sovereign, government-administered version of GPT-4o specifically for public sector use. Every government agency now has access to advanced AI capabilities while ensuring that sensitive data remains within Australian borders and under Australian legal jurisdiction.
This approach delivers immediate access to state-of-the-art AI capabilities for public servants and citizens alike. The tradeoff involves continued dependence on proprietary American technology, but Australia maintains meaningful control over implementation, data governance, and usage policies. Australia’s model demonstrates that nations need not choose between technological advancement and democratic accountability.
America’s Abdication of Leadership
While other democracies assert control over AI governance, America has chosen to delegate this critical responsibility to the private sector. Government agencies can procure AI services through existing commercial channels. The National Institute of Standards and Technology provides risk management frameworks. The White House publishes strategic documents and action plans.
However, the United States has not developed a single publicly stewarded AI model, nor has the federal government seriously proposed such an initiative. Instead, we are repeating a familiar pattern that has characterized American policy toward healthcare, telecommunications, and energy infrastructure. We assume that private markets will naturally align with public interests, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
This approach predictably produces the same results: higher costs, unequal access, and diminished public accountability.
A Framework for American Leadership
The United States should synthesize lessons from both Switzerland’s commitment to openness and Australia’s emphasis on sovereignty. We need a federal “CERN for AI” that combines democratic governance with technological excellence.
Establish National AI Infrastructure. Deploy American national laboratories and supercomputing resources to develop open-source language models that rival anything produced by private corporations. These models should function as genuine public infrastructure, not government experiments.
Mandate Comprehensive Transparency. Require publication of model weights, training datasets, and evaluation methodologies. Democratic societies cannot accept algorithmic black boxes when AI systems make decisions affecting public welfare.
Prioritize Inclusive Access. Design these systems to serve underserved linguistic communities, enhance public service delivery, and address accessibility challenges that private companies routinely ignore in pursuit of profitable market segments.
Create Accountable Governance. Establish oversight structures that integrate academic expertise, federal responsibility, and independent review mechanisms to ensure these systems serve democratic rather than commercial objectives.
Enable Secure Deployment. Make these public models available through government-grade secure environments while allowing states, municipalities, and universities to adapt them for local needs and priorities.
This framework does not require the federal government to abandon commercial AI procurement entirely. Rather, it ensures that when commercial terms prove inadequate for security, affordability, or equity concerns, democratic institutions possess viable alternatives.
The Stakes Could Not Be Higher
AI represents far more than another consumer technology or business opportunity. These systems will increasingly mediate access to information, determine the quality of public services, and shape economic opportunities for generations of Americans. Abandoning AI governance entirely to private corporations will deepen existing inequalities and concentrate unprecedented power in the hands of a small number of technology executives who face no meaningful democratic accountability.
Switzerland demonstrates that smaller nations can lead by treating AI as a genuine public good. Australia shows that democratic sovereignty over critical technologies remains both possible and practical. The United States possesses the resources, expertise, and democratic responsibility to pursue both objectives simultaneously. The question is whether our political system can summon the will to treat AI as what it fundamentally represents: the infrastructure of twenty-first-century democracy. This infrastructure belongs to all Americans. The time has come to claim it.
