On the second day of the Tech Diplomacy Global Institute’s presence at UNGA High-Level Week, Ayumi Moore Aoki, Founder and President of the Institute, will chair a closed-door breakfast roundtable on sovereign AI, convened with Mia AI and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Estonia, represented by H.E. Helen Popp, Ambassador-at-Large for Cyber Diplomacy.
Every government now speaks about sovereign AI, and few have mapped what is actually controlled. The claims are made at the level of policy, while the dependencies sit at the level of infrastructure: compute, data, energy, standards and legal reach. The roundtable asks the table to locate, layer by layer, where control over AI actually sits today, who holds it, and where the gap is widest between what is claimed as sovereign and what is actually controlled.
The session is built on the Diplomatic Digital Stack developed by Professor Corneliu Bjola of the University of Oxford, a six-layer framework in which sovereignty is understood as the capacity to choose which dependencies to accept rather than as the ownership of every layer. Around twenty participants will take part under the Chatham House Rule: Tech Ambassadors or equivalent tech diplomacy envoys, senior officials of foreign ministries and diplomatic missions, the United Nations system, researchers and industry. Ayumi will deliver the framing intervention and chair the two timed rounds.
The session follows the roundtable of 23 September on who delivers global AI governance. Both are part of the official Digital@UNGA 2026 Affiliate Sessions programme and feed into the Tech Diplomacy Asia Symposium in Tashkent on 14 October 2026 and the Tech Diplomacy Global Assembly in Paris on 11 December 2026.
Participation is by invitation, subject to approval: luma.com/tdgi-unga924 | More at tdgi.org