AI Sovereignty for Business and Society: Project Tapestry, Open Source AI & Data Governance

What does it take to build AI that nations, enterprises, researchers, and communities can actually own? During UN Open Source Week in New York, the AI Alliance convened researchers, open source leaders, enterprise practitioners, and sovereign AI builders for a deep conversation on the future of AI infrastructure. This session explores Project Tapestry, the AI Alliance’s effort to build community-owned, frontier-capable sovereign AI through distributed model development. Speakers discuss why the future of AI depends not only on bigger models and more compute, but on scaling participation, responsibly unlocking data, expanding linguistic and cultural coverage, and giving organizations greater agency over the systems they build and deploy. Topics include: • Project Tapestry and the future of sovereign AI • Consortium training and distributed model development • Cultural alignment and the Next Billion AI Index • Responsible data use across the spectrum from private to fully open • Expanding multilingual and cultural coverage with Common Crawl • Network-source AI and attribution-based data control • Moving AI from pilot projects into production • Why open source infrastructure matters for sovereign AI Speakers include leaders and contributors from the AI Alliance, IBM, Common Crawl Foundation, OpenMined, and Red Hat. Chapters: 00:00 Opening / pre-event 25:00 Welcome and framing: what sovereignty means in AI 30:00 AI Alliance and Project Tapestry overview 45:00 Consortium training and sovereign nodes 1:00:00 Cultural alignment and the Next Billion AI Index 1:20:00 Data spectrum: from private to fully open 2:20:00 Common Crawl and multilingual data coverage 2:45:00 OpenMined and network-source AI 3:05:00 Owning your platform AI journey 3:25:00 Closing reflections Learn more about the AI Alliance: thealliance.ai Explore AI Alliance projects on GitHub Follow the AI Alliance for more conversations on open source AI, sovereign AI, trustworthy AI, and the future of shared AI infrastructure. #aisovereignty #OpenSourceAI #ProjectTapestry #AIAlliance #DataGovernance #ResponsibleAI #FrontierAI #GenerativeAI #OpenInnovation