# Most nations risk becoming AI dependents > Source: > Published: 2026-07-17 21:36:54+00:00 While the US and China go head-to-head on AI advances, other nations are struggling to grow their AI footprints. A [report from Forrester](https://www.forrester.com/press-newsroom/forrester-global-sovereignty-forecast-2030/) released last week found that technology sovereignty, or a country's ability to develop, run and secure new technologies independently of foreign influence, will grow slowly over the next five years. While the US and China have the highest tech sovereignty scores according to Forrester's index, sitting at 79% and 82% respectively, the other 12 countries assessed had an average score of 39%, relying heavily on imported AI and tech infrastructure. In addition to the US and China, the countries surveyed in Forrester’s Global Sovereignty Forecast include Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Spain, and the UK. - The index assesses several dimensions of tech sovereignty: government AI investment, cloud, workforce, AI model development, data center capacity and autonomy, chip production, software creation and rare earths processing. - On average, these countries are forecasted to see tech sovereignty rise by only 1% by 2030, from 39% to 40%, while the US and China are expected to maintain their leads. - The only dimension that shows promise in increased sovereignty is chip production, with South Korea, Japan and India seeing significant growth in independent production. The fact that the US and China hold global dominance in AI and tech broadly presents a number of problems, Dario Maisto, principal analyst at Forrester, told The Deep View. For one, as organizations and nations seek more AI services, they will likely increase their dependence on foreign vendors. Feeding their data to these models could then "pose a problem for data appropriability and IP defensibility," said Maisto. Furthermore, the US-China duopoly makes choosing an AI vendor more than just a matter of model capabilities. It is also a political decision, he said. It opens the problem of "tech diplomacy." He said, "By choosing one model or the other, for example, an organization might signal political closeness to one country or the other." "Enterprises’ and nations’ choices will not be driven solely by price and performance of the AI technologies and solutions, but also by the possible retaliation measures of one country because they chose the technology of the other," Maisto added. ## Our Deeper *View* There are solutions for the problem of global dependence on two overwhelming powers, such as nations investing in homegrown talent and models and eventually restricting access to foreign models, Maisto told me. However, that scale of an investment could take years and may not even be economically sound. Because of this, nations are largely left with few options other than to feed into the US-China duopoly, treading carefully around the political weight of the models they choose. The situation echoes what we've seen in the private markets among AI companies themselves: [a massive well of power held by a small pool of companies](https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/the-race-for-power-behind-ai-s-utopian-story). Still, some companies seek to prevent this by creating more options, taking it upon themselves to feed into the open source AI market, including [Nvidia's Nemotron](https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/why-nvidia-threw-its-weight-behind-open-source-ai) family, [Google's Gemma](https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/google-rethinks-the-ai-model-race-with-gemma-4) family, [Thinking Machine's latest model](https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/new-us-open-model-takes-on-china-s-top-ai) Inkling, and the pool of open models from labs like DeepSeek, MiniMax and [Moonshot](https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/the-catch-behind-kimi-k3-s-benchmark-leap). Though this at least creates some market fragmentation, these models primarily still come from the US and China.