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.

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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

Near Protocol

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