Expanding AI Sovereignty to AI Agency
AI is reshaping global power, prosperity and security but debates about AI sovereignty are often binary, conflated, lacking evidence, and disconnected from the complex trade-offs leaders face.
TPDi’s AI Agency Tool, presented here in its final form, offers a practical solution.
The Tool is a structured and repeatable method to assess a nation’s AI maturity, sovereignty and agency across 103 AI capabilities, producing prioritised recommended actions.
We applied the tool to produce Australia’s 2025 AI Agency Assessment: the first comprehensive, independent, evidence-based, expert-led assessment of Australia’s AI capabilities at the national level. We then mapped the Australian Government’s 2025 National AI Plan against the assessment.
The tool is adaptable and scalable. We invite you to apply the tool so that your country, region, sector, community or organisation to identify your agency and help to proactively shape a technology that is already shaping our world.
Everyone, it seems, wants ‘AI sovereignty’. But what most need is ‘AI agency’.
The term ‘AI sovereignty’ dominates policy discussions and drives investment decisions but is used to mean everything from strategic self-reliance to cultural preservation and individual autonomy.
Its use as a binary – where AI is sovereign, or it is not – leaves most countries disempowered. There are also more practical confusions. AI is not one thing, so exactly what AI capabilities are we talking about? How do you measure them? What would sovereignty really mean in each case? Since we published our discussion paper in November 2025, From AI Sovereignty to AI Agency, the debate has gained momentum. Binary notions of AI and sovereignty are increasingly seen as reductive in today’s strategic landscape.
AI agency is the power of a country to shape its AI future.
The global AI supply chain is a complex global web, and power comes from the ability to shape relationships, not retreat from them. TPDi’s AI Agency Tool offers a practical solution.
Instead of only asking if a country possesses sovereign control, the tool assesses whether a country has AI agency to steer outcomes, protect and promote national interests, and capture value in a globally connected system.
Sovereignty is an enduring principle.
The concept of AI agency put forward in this report does not signal a rejection, dilution or abandonment of the concept of sovereignty. On the contrary, the pursuit of AI agency is grounded in the very objectives that animate the pursuit of sovereignty. It offers a pragmatic policy approach that recognises most countries cannot, and need not, lead and control every AI capability.
The AI Agency Tool
6 Layers and 103 Capabilities
The aim is not to lead in all 103 capabilities – but, rather, to understand strengths, reduce critical dependencies, & build leverage where national advantages exist. The AI Agency Tool provides an evidence-based framework to do this, grounded in data rather than instinct or spin.
How to use the tool
What is it? The AI Agency Tool is a structured and repeatable method to assess a nation’s AI maturity, sovereignty and agency across 103 AI capabilities, producing prioritised recommended actions.
Why does it matter? The tool equips decision-makers to pursue AI agency: the capacity to steer outcomes, protect and promote national interests, and capture value in a globally connected system. Used well, the tool enables nuanced strategies, better-targeted investment, and deeper understandings of trade-offs. The tool equips leaders to identify their leverage in high agency capabilities and harness it to offset their vulnerabilities.
Who is it for?
- Policymakers of countries of all sizes and stages of AI maturity, particularly where strategic dependence is high, and choices are constrained (Australia’s application from page 14).
- Business leaders navigating geopolitical risk, supply chains and long-term investment decisions (uses for enterprise assessments on page 21).
- Researchers conducting national assessments, tracking progress over time and holding governments accountable (tool guide from page 25 and methodology from page 33).
How does it work? A step-by-step process to gather evidence and make assessments to both inform and analyse strategy.
Overview of the AI Agency Tool
The AI Agency Tool starts by producing a maturity rating for 103 AI capabilities defined in the typology. It then situates the traditional binary objective of sovereign control over those capabilities within an expanded spectrum that is fit for purpose in today’s strategic landscape. The traditional control framing is expanded to also consider the management of international partnerships (access), the importance of resilience (choice) and pursuit of competitive advantage (leverage). We call this the sovereignty spectrum. An assessment of each element of the spectrum produces a sovereignty rating.
The maturity and sovereignty ratings, and an assessment of global scarcity, are then combined into a single view to produce an AI agency score – a measure of national competitive advantage for each AI capability.
AI agency thus offers a pragmatic pathway for advancing sovereignty: pursuing enduring principles of control and self-determination, while equipping leaders to navigate a world of international interdependence (including shared infrastructure and global supply chains) and geopolitical competition.
The visualisation below shows how sovereignty is embedded as a core element of the AI Agency Tool.
The tool is adaptable and scalable. The right mix of strategic capabilities will differ country to country. We invite you to apply the tool so that your country, region, sector, community or organisation.
A digital version of the tool is coming soon: watch this space.
The Tool in Practice: Australia’s 2025 AI Agency Assessment
Strategic silences in the National AI Plan align with areas of low national agency.
Not all omissions from the plan should be viewed as gaps. For many capabilities the assessment’s recommended action is ‘maintain and monitor’. Many of the areas receiving limited attention in the plan fall into this category. They are capabilities where Australia currently has low maturity and low agency, or where government intervention is less necessary. This includes:
- accelerator manufacturing
- frontier model development
- most forms of private-sector AI capability.
The government has reasonably adopted a targeted approach in the plan, focusing public investment on what the government has assessed to be foundational capabilities while allowing the private sector to lead where appropriate.
There is untapped potential in Australia’s highest agency capabilities.
While the plan establishes strong foundations, it does not fully capitalise on all of Australia’s areas of highest agency – the capabilities in which Australia has competitive advantage. The assessment identifies opportunities to better leverage Australia’s strengths in critical minerals, strategic data assets and model development in computer vision. These are areas where Australia already possesses very high agency and which could be used more deliberately to strengthen national capability, address weaknesses and close critical gaps elsewhere in the AI ecosystem, while increasing Australia’s international leverage.
Australia’s 2025 AI Agency Assessment is the first application of the AI Agency Tool. It assesses Australia’s AI maturity, sovereignty, agency (as at December 2025), and produces recommended actions across 103 capabilities. We then mapped the Australian Government’s 2025 National AI Plan against the assessment.
Australia’s highest areas of agency
The assessment found Australia has 8 capabilities that fall within the highest band: very high agency. This includes:
- our rich endowment in strategic and critical minerals
- 5 domain specific datasets (medical, geospatial, environment and resources, demographic and infrastructure)
- our expertise in developing computer vision models
- our proven impact in international engagement (influence and norm shaping).
Every significant commitment in the National AI Plan aligns with the assessment’s recommendations.
Governments have finite resources and must make tough decisions about what to prioritise. It is noteworthy that the plan is strongly aligned with the assessment’s findings on where Australia should leverage, build or maintain agency. The plan’s major commitments focus on areas where Australia already possesses meaningful maturity and agency. This includes:
- data centres and supporting infrastructure
- public cloud
- general AI applications
- government and small to medium enterprise (SME) adoption
- international engagement.
Leaning into these capabilities harnesses existing strengths while also offering enabling benefits across the whole ecosystem.
The assessment found only 2 capabilities in which Australia has the lowest level of agency, these being manufacturing and packaging of accelerators (AI chips).
There are critical gaps to close
The assessment also identifies several globally scarce capabilities that are important to the public interest but remain underdeveloped in Australia – these capabilities should be the focus of the next wave of government prioritisation. This includes:
- public sector and public interest compute infrastructure
- key data lifecycle management capabilities (such as copyright, sourcing, validation and annotation)
- culturally and nationally inclusive models
- discerning, inclusive, and trusted AI adoption
- general AI literacy
- several specialised AI skills
- regulatory and oversight capability.
Addressing these gaps would strengthen Australia’s ability to support innovation, research, public services and national resilience, while ensuring AI systems reflect Australian values, cultures and identities and, perhaps most importantly, ensure that the benefits of AI are widely distributed.
⬇️ Assessment: Australia’s 2025 AI Agency Assessment
⬇️ Analysis: Australia’s National AI Plan cf: Australia’s AI Agency Assessment
Read the Analysis of Australia’s 2025 Assessment and National AI Plan
Acknowledgments
Sovereignty was never ceded
TPDi acknowledges the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people who are the Traditional Owners of the land upon which this report was prepared in Canberra, Australia. We pay our respects to Elders past and present.
The authors affirm that sovereignty has never been ceded by First Nations peoples living on the continent now known as Australia. We recognise Indigenous Sovereignty as enduring and inherent, as well as fundamentally different to the new concept of ‘AI sovereignty’ (to which this report is responding).
Any national conversation about AI should reinforce, rather than distract from, the distinct and profoundly important conversations about Indigenous Sovereignty and governance. The AI Agency Tool emphasises the importance of pursuing both Indigenous Sovereignty and AI agency in parallel. Indeed, they can be understood as reinforcing policy goals.
The tool explicitly highlights the importance of Indigenous Sovereignty. First Nations interests and sensitivities are profound and intersecting across all 103 AI capabilities identified in the typology. A review of the typology through lenses of cultural priority, sovereignty beyond a nation-state framing, lived experience, and the risk of structural harm, revealed that at least 38 AI capabilities have particular implications for First Nations peoples. The tool frames inclusive, empowering and rights-respecting approaches to these capabilities as indicators of AI maturity.
The concept of AI agency will look different in practice for different stakeholders, including First Nations peoples compared to governments and organisations. The tool is intended to be adopted and applied by different groups, shaped by their distinct perspectives and priorities in implementation. In this way, it acts as both an assessment and a transparency tool.
This approach is intended to support the empowerment of Indigenous voices, leadership and agency in future-proofing communities and shaping Australia’s future.
See pages 4 and 46 in the Report for further discussion on these issues.
A collective endeavour
Authors
Zoe Jay Hawkins, Co-Founder and Deputy Executive Director, TPDi; Johanna Weaver, Co-Founder and Executive Director, TPDi; Rebecca Razavi, Visiting Policy Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute; Executive Director, UNSW Public Policy Institute; Meredith Hodgman, Head of Strategy and Engagement, TPDi; Vili Lehdonvirta, Professor of Technology Policy, Aalto University; Senior Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute; Mercedes Page, Visiting Scholar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and Murray Lab. With invaluable contributions from Dorina Wittmann, Heidi Brockway and Helen Portillo-Castro.
Peer Reviewers
We are grateful for the invaluable feedback we received throughout the project from our peer reviewers (affiliations at time of review): Andrew Brodie, Eva Hopewell and Todd Phillips (Deadly Coders), Belinda Dennett (AirTrunk), Brendan Hopper (Commonwealth Bank of Australia), Clare Beaton-Wells (United Nations Youth Australia), Christina Wiremu-Brook (Kuria), Dave Lemphers (Maincode), David Masters (Atlassian), Dot West, Lyndon Ormand-Parker and Daniel Featherstone (First Nations Digital Inclusion Advisory Group), Prof Elanor Huntington (CSIRO), Ian Opperman (ServiceGen), Jamie Morse (Macquarie Technology Group), Josh Griggs and Pauline Fetaui (Australian Computer Society), Kate Conroy (Queensland University of Technology), Kyle Turner (Paul Ramsay Foundation), Lee Hickin (National AI Centre), Liam Carroll, Bill Simpson Young, Alistair Reid and Tiberio Caetano (Gradient Institute), Mark Stickells (Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre), Nadia Court, Tanya Saad and Anna Gurevich (Semiconductor Sector Service Bureau), Rosie Hicks (Australian Research Data Commons), Sally Ann Williams (Australian Academy of Technological Sciences & Engineering), Scott Winch (Sax Institute), Simon Kriss (Sovereign AI Australia), Simon Spencer (Trideca), Dr Sue Keay (Robotics Australia Group), Taylor Dee Hawkins (Foundations for Tomorrow), Dr Tobias Feakin (Protostar Strategy), Tim Carton (CDC Data Centres), and Tim Moriarty (Muzo.ai).
Consultations
TPDi gratefully acknowledges the contributions of experts and organisations who participated in workshops, surveys, interviews and peer reviews that informed this project. Their participation reflects wide engagement across Australia’s technology, research, policy and civil society communities.
In September 2025, TPDi brought together over 250 individuals and 187 organisations across five cities, and online, to survey and map Australia’s AI strengths and define our path forward.
A special acknowledgment to the industry and research bodies that helped amplify the consultation process, with executive participation and opportunities for their members to contribute, including the Australian Academy of Science (AAS), Australian Computer Society (ACS), Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA), Electronic Frontiers Australia Inc, IoT Alliance Australia (IoTAA), Digital Rights Watch (DRW), the Kingston AI Group, ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), Gradient Institute, Science and Technology Australia (STA), Tech Council of Australia (TCA), and the UNSW AI Institute.
A full list of the individuals and organisation who participated in the consultations in an Annex of the Report – with thanks from team TPDi to each and every person.
Building on previous work
The Final Report, Assessment and Analysis presented on this webpage build on the Discussion Paper, and the Draft Australia AI Capability Assessment, published by TPDi in November 2025.
This work builds on longstanding research by TPDi Co-Founder Zoe Jay Hawkins and colleagues Vili Lehdonvirta and Bóxī Wú (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford & Aalto University) on compute sovereignty, which has been featured by The New York Times, the Australian Financial Review, TIME Magazine, BBC, The Economist, The Financial Times, Forbes, and POLITICO (among others).
A thanks to our supporters
This project was made possible by the generous support of the Australian Computer Society and the Department of Industry, Science and Resources.
TPDi’s independence is our most valuable asset. As a registered not-for-profit, our work is supported by external funding. We only accept funding from entities that agree to be disclosed publicly and commit to respect and promote TPDi’s independence. TPDi does not represent the views of any of our funders; all outputs represent solely the views of TPDi and/or the authors. Learn more about TPDi’s blind trust funding model and how this protects and promotes our independence.
