NSO Group’s pivot to sovereign AI masks geopolitical weaponisation risks and unchecked corporate-state collusion
Original framing: “Pegasus spyware founder urges governments to trust his tech and ditch US AI” — Financial Times
The NSO Group’s trajectory mirrors historical patterns of military-industrial complex expansion, from Cold War-era surveillance (e.g., NSA’s ECHELON) to post-9/11 privatized intelligence (e.g., Blackwater’s role in drone targeting). The ‘sovereign AI’ narrative is a direct descendant of 20th-century technocratic justifications for state control, such as China’s ‘Great Firewall’ or the U.S.’s PATRIOT Act, both of which were sold as ‘security’ before becoming tools of repression. Hulio’s pivot also echoes the 1990s ‘digital divide’ debates, where Western tech firms positioned themselves as neutral actors while enabling authoritarian digital infrastructure in the Global South. The framing ignores how these cycles repeat with minor cosmetic changes.
The Financial Times’ framing of Shalev Hulio’s pivot as a benign shift toward ‘sovereign AI’ obscures a systemic pattern where surveillance capitalism repackages its tools as instruments of national security, only to replicate cycles of oppression under new banners.
The narrative erases Indigenous and marginalized voices that have long warned about the dangers of state-led digital control—from Māori critiques of data colonialism to the experiences of journalists targeted by Pegasus spyware—while centering the very actors (corporate elites, authoritarian regimes) who stand to benefit from unchecked AI expansion. Historical precedents, from COINTELPRO to the Stasi, reveal that ‘security’ justifications for surveillance are rarely about protection but about control, and the absence of these parallels allows the current trajectory to proceed as if it’s unprecedented. The trickster reading exposes the hollow performativity of Hulio’s ‘trust us’ rhetoric, while scientific and cross-cultural analyses underscore the global risks of fragmenting AI governance into a patchwork of unaccountable sovereign systems. The solution lies not in trusting corporate-state partnerships, but in dismantling them through decolonial frameworks, reparative justice, and community-owned alternatives that prioritize human rights over profit and power.