Nathan Benaich on MTS: governments are spending $138B on sovereign AI

Key points

On 9 October 2026, the day the ninth State of AI report launched, Air Street Capital founder and general partner Nathan Benaich joined host Sophia on MTS, a daily live tech and business show (28:55).

What they discussed The report's research, industry, politics and safety sections and its predictions: the three-lab race at the frontier, AI increasingly helping to build AI, long-horizon agents and the challenge of controlling autonomous agents, the enormous growth in inference, robotics nearing its "GPT-2 moment", AI drug discovery, cybersecurity, and predictions for 2027.

Sovereign AI Benaich argued that countries whose own companies are not at the frontier are now working out how to broker access to frontier intelligence: "the most logical way of doing this is by providing like powered land um and data centers most likely for inference." He put the total at "about like 138 billion of investment in sovereign AI", counting initiatives in the Middle East, Europe, Asia and the US.

Why the report exists Benaich said that when he started it in 2018 there was no canonical open-access document on AI progress that was not a consulting report. The report draws on his day job investing in AI companies at Air Street.

Source MTS on YouTube: Sovereign AI Hits $138B as Nations Rush for Compute | Nathan Benaich