The First Workshop on Sovereign AI for Collaborative and Pluralistic AI Ecosystems
As today's AI ecosystem is shaped by models, data, and compute concentrated in a few global institutions, discussions of "sovereign AI" are often reduced to a question of infrastructure. This workshop asks a deeper question: who holds the power to decide what stories AI tells, whose communities it represents, and whose values it is aligned to?
Overview
Sovereignty is often equated with owning one's own compute and models — but compute and models are ultimately the means of sovereignty, not its ends. This workshop convenes the AI, HCI, and law & policy communities around a shared question: how can technical capacity, interaction design, and governance institutions together keep AI systems contestable and answerable to the communities they represent?
Topics of Interest
We invite contributions across five broad themes; the questions and topics below are starting points rather than limits.
A single question runs through them all: whose contexts, values, and narratives do AI systems encode — and who has the standing to contest and correct them?
1. Safety and Alignment for Agentic & Physical AI — Aligned to Whose Values?
How do we ensure that increasingly autonomous and embodied AI systems remain safe, aligned, and under meaningful human control when they are adapted or deployed beyond the contexts in which they were built? "Alignment" presupposes a set of values — whose? And whose social norms serve as the baseline against which "safety" is evaluated?
Possible topics: agentic and embodied AI, pluralistic value alignment, culturally situated safety evaluation, human-in-the-loop
2. Open Models, Data Sovereignty, and Responsible Deployment
How can open models and local data governance move beyond the defensive goal of "reducing dependence" to become positive conditions for cultural and narrative agency? How can communities build on global models while retaining control over how their data, corpora, and knowledge are collected, interpreted, and used?
Possible topics: Indigenous and community data sovereignty, open-weight and foundation models, local adaptation, data provenance
3. Human Agency & Trustworthy Human-AI Interaction
How can people effectively understand, oversee, and intervene in AI systems without losing their own agency?
Possible topics: human-AI interaction, explainable AI (XAI), contestability by design, culturally situated trust and reliance
4. Language, Cultural Narrative, and the Agency of Local Knowledge in AI
When AI systems are trained on externally constructed corpora and values, how can local communities reclaim the interpretive authority to define their own languages, stories, and knowledge?
Possible topics: multilingual and low-resource NLP, culturally grounded AI, community-driven data and models, participatory design
5. Democratic Resilience and Multi-Stakeholder AI Governance
How can governments, researchers, industry, and the public meaningfully participate in governing AI and holding it accountable? And when "the local community" is itself plural — even internally contested — who has the legitimacy to speak on its behalf?
Possible topics: legitimacy and representation in AI governance, agile regulatory design, public accountability, co-governance
Call for Papers
This workshop invites researchers and practitioners to rethink sovereign AI through the lens of human-AI collaboration, interaction, and governance: when global models inevitably shape local lives, how can communities retain the capacity to define their own narratives, values, and collective futures?
We welcome contributions that advance, critique, or reimagine sovereign AI through three complementary paths — technical (models, data, safety, and evaluation), design (interaction, oversight, and intervention), and institutional (law, policy, and governance) — and we especially encourage work that crosses these boundaries. We particularly welcome submissions from researchers and practitioners in AI (including NLP and ML), HCI, law and public policy, government, journalism, civil society, open-source communities, and related fields.
Submissions may take the form of full papers, work in progress, or real-world case studies. Accepted submissions will be presented as an oral presentation or a poster. All papers are non-arxival.
Submission Site:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sovereignai2026