# Why AI's decentralization movement has arrived > Source: > Published: 2026-06-23 21:25:01+00:00 If the AI industry has a counter-cultural movement right now, then it's the group focused on decentralizing power and enabling bottom-up innovation. On Tuesday at the [Confidential Computing Summit](https://events.linuxfoundation.org/confidential-computing-summit/) in San Francisco, a group leaders from major tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, AMD, Intel and others, came together to spearhead efforts to implement data sovereignty, cybersecurity, and privacy, putting each enterprise in control of its own destiny so it can thrive when the unstoppable wave of AI agents hits in the months and years ahead. A lot of the answers on how to make that happen circled back to open-source solutions, which wasn't surprising, considering The Linux Foundation was the organizing entity. "In order to use the best models, people are giving up their data, and that data then pulls into one or two [models]... And then everybody becomes dependent upon one or two entities," said Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of Opaque and emcee of the event. "That creates a system that is very fragile and brittle. It's one in which there's a single off-switch, one in which there's a single set of blind spots, and it is not a durable environment." The diverse set of speakers made recommendations that coalesced around four key themes: **Protect what agents hold in memory**: Organizations need mechanisms to encrypt, control, and even permanently delete what agents learn and remember, especially when handling confidential customer, financial, healthcare, or other strategic data.**Build systems with hardware-based trust**: Enterprises can't trust software policies to govern increasingly autonomous agents. The speakers argued that trust must be rooted in hardware-based confidential computing, where security rules are enforced and verified cryptographically at the chip level.**Give every agent a verified identity and audit trail**: Every agent operating in an enterprise environment needs a tamper-proof record of what it's allowed to do, what it actually did, and what data it touched. This makes agent behavior auditable, accountable, and defensible to regulators. At the event, The Linux Foundation[announced the Agent Name Service (ANS)](https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-announces-intent-to-launch-agent-name-service-to-establish-trusted-identity-infrastructure-for-ai-agents), much like the DNS system that provides a similar function for the internet.**Control data sovereignty with external models**: Multiple speakers warned against a future in which enterprises must hand over their most valuable data to a handful of AI providers to access the best models. The alternative they advocated is a "sovereign AI" approach. That means holding your own encryption keys, setting your own policies on how data flows, and getting verifiable proof that those policies were followed. Without this, companies risk becoming permanently dependent on a handful of AI providers. "We should never have to pay for AI with our data," said Fulkerson. "Let's optimize for freedom: the freedom to choose which model you want without having to pay for it with your data." ## Our Deeper *View* The group of companies that came together at the Confidential Computing Summit articulated clear, comprehensive insights and recommendations for creating decentralized, locally controlled AI. The pendulum swings between centralization and decentralization doesn't just mirror the on-prem vs. cloud debates a generation ago — although it would be easy to see it that way. AI is a much more active agent (forgive the pun) in the future of technology than cloud storage and hosting ever were. The stakes are far higher for both enterprises and society. So it's encouraging to see the intensity and the precision of the recommendations coming out of this event. Notably absent were OpenAI and Anthropic, although Anthropic's deputy CISO is on the panel I'm on Wednesday at the event. Follow my updates in real-time on X/Twitter at [x.com/jasonhiner](http://x.com/jasonhiner) to see what more we learn.