French AI researcher Yann LeCun said Wednesday that governments were right to seek sovereign access to the potentially transformative technology.
The intervention from the respected former head of Meta's AI efforts comes as European governments scramble following America's cutoff of access to powerful models from developer Anthropic.
"I've been talking to a bunch of governments around the world. They all want AI sovereignty, and I think they're right," LeCun told an audience of tech businesspeople at the Paris Vivatech trade fair.
Sovereignty is "very important, because very soon all of our information diet will be mediated by AI assistants," LeCun added.
"We need access to a wide diversity of AI assistants for the same reason we need access to a wide diversity of the press, to get multiple sources of information."
