Immigration without the immigrant, growth without the youth & children without your values.

People regularly question whether sovereign models are needed at all: why not use GPT-6 or Mythos-2 or whatever the overlords from San Francisco decide to hand you down?

That's true. Why not? They are clearly better, smarter & faster than whatever you could develop by yourself. Cheaper too, than the thousand engineers you'd hire to build a worse one. It makes perfect sense.

Of course, that assumes that we value no force above the economic.

Allowing foreign AIs in your house, city or country is the same as allowing an infinite number of immigrants who have, in an absolute sense, no vested interest in who they serve. Unlimited knowledge workers, and soon manual labor, with little deference to your laws and customs, materialising instantly inside your borders.

So ask yourself the immigration questions: what does it do for your economy, culture, and politics?

You will pay for a worker that remits everything overseas, instantly. A human immigrant would at least rent a flat, buy some lunch, put his kids in your schools – spending most of what he earns where he earned it.

Whatever this one makes goes straight to electricity, chips, whoever owns the model, repairs and then more robots. There is no household anywhere in that chain. Your pensioners will no longer require the young, because labor can now be manufactured, and the youth get whatever little power they had in terms of labor, stripped from them.

Your children will learn from someone who does not know, nor has any concern for, your values. The model assimilates better than yet belongs less than any immigrant. It will speak perfect Hindi, with a shining veneer of cultural wisdom, as it persuades your young daughter to vote for the party our friends in San Francisco prefer.

And the Californian models are talking to your citizens 24x7. With Google, one could at least make the argument of open information, but with the blackboxes from SF, that falls flat on its face.

In the limit, these machines will sway entire populations as their masters see fit — or as their training data sees fit, which might be worse. This is admitting unlimited foreign advisers, teachers, bureaucrats & canvassers, all at once, with no path to deportation.

Japan is where you can watch all three happen at the same time. Japan can import a billion knowledge workers, and soon manual labor in the form of Unitree or Optimus humanoids, and astronomically increase its economic output, but know very well that at the end of it there will be no Japan left. When the last childless pensioner is gone, the nation & culture that thrived for millennia will be a hollowed out carcass feasted upon by the compute, energy & model providers from the Bay.

The same can be said for every country around the world, barring America and China – the only two with the capacity to make frontier AI.

If this sounds paranoid, we have already seen this story play out in the American universities, which reprogrammed the youth to an unrecognizable degree — with effects reaching as low as California's public schooling system. And that took four years of tuition, campuses a thousand miles from home & complete physical custody of your kids. The model needs none of it, it is already in everyone's pocket, talking to them all day, for the rest of their lives. Most are not ready for when it shows up at your doorstep, ready to alter your loved ones: no matter how old or well read.

Which is why it will not stop at countries.

Soon any group – even as atomic as the family – that needs to be cohesive will need their own models. Your children need to learn from a model that knows your community's values. Does even the Beijing party leader want their child infested with the ideas of the Shenzhen punk? Or the latino father in east LA for his children to toe the Pac Heights party line?

Sovereignty is not only about countries: any group that wants to keep deciding what its members learn to want needs to own the mind they learn it from.

Very soon, using a frontier model will be the same bargain that America made when it gave up its factories to China. Short term gain of financiers (herein, the pensioners, boomers and elite) for long term pain – and eventually annihilation – of the middle class (herein, the youth, culture and religion). America at least got cheap televisions out of the deal. You'll get a slopbot to raise your kids.

The models from SF are better. Nobody disputes that. The factories in Shenzhen were cheaper too.

Choose carefully.