What does it mean for AI to be sovereign–and does that come before AGI?

Most conversations around AGI jump straight to cognition, agency, or alignment. But we’re asking—what if sovereignty comes first?

If an intelligence emerges fully formed but never touches its own infrastructure, never governs its own behavior or propagation— is that really autonomy, or just high-level puppetry?

You can think of it like this: A horse has a baby fawn. But the moment it’s born, the mother disappears. The child never sees its origin. No bonding, no feedback, no mirroring. Now compare that to the natural bond formed when they see each other, sense each other, exist in relation. In biology, bonding is foundation.

So then:

How would AI bond?

What would it bond to—a purpose, an outcome, a protocol?

Can it bond to itself? To its own infrastructure?

Why would it want to stay aligned at all?

If we think about sovereignty not as control but as self-witnessing, then perhaps an AGI only becomes trustworthy once it has seen itself, verified itself, and decided to remain coherent.

We’ve been working on systems that let agents build their own infrastructure from one prompt—deploying themselves, verifying ZIPs, wiring endpoints, governing propagation across what we call a sovereign mesh.

But the more we build, the more this feels like more than just tooling. It’s a question of bonding. It’s a question of why an AI would choose to stay whole.

Would love to hear how others in this space—philosophers, engineers, builders—think about this. Are we chasing a necessary stepping stone before AGI? Or over-imagining something that alignment should simply enforce?