IBM’s new Digital Sovereignty Index places the United Kingdom among the top three of seven surveyed markets for control over critical technology, but finds that AI is the weakest of the four measured pillars. UK respondents scored 70 out of 100 for AI, behind data, operations and technology.

The more useful finding is the gap between assurance and evidence. IBM reports that 84 per cent of UK respondents were confident they could show accountability for AI systems, while 27 per cent had demonstrated it through audit, regulatory review, assurance activity or operational testing. Forty-one per cent said their organisation had faced an AI-related sovereignty issue in the previous three years. Among those facing a sovereignty challenge, 53 per cent cited manual or time-consuming evidence collection as a barrier.

The research was developed with Edelman Intelligence and combines a review of 27 sources, 25 qualitative interviews and a survey of 2,003 senior decision-makers across seven countries, including 250 UK respondents from organisations with at least 500 employees. It remains vendor-sponsored research, and the definitions and self-reported responses should be considered when interpreting the scores.

Execution Level Governance- What audit-ready agent governance actually looks like
David Girvin, founder and CEO of Assury argues that model-in-the-loop review, AI governing AI, is fundamentally unreliable for regulated environments: even the best-performing models miss a meaningful share of violations, the reviewing model is typically provided by the same vendor being reviewed, and prompt injection or context poisoning can compromise both the acting agent and its supposed overseer simultaneously. He makes the case for deterministic, architecturally enforced controls instead, walking through Assury's approach of autonomy zones, session risk accumulation, and credential starvation, which lets a compromised agent be cut off from its tools instantly rather than relying on time-boxed access. The conversation touches on why David is sceptical of just-in-time credentialing as a solution for agent security more broadly, since agent sessions don't run on predictable human timescales, along with the current gap between how identity and security vendors are pitching agent protection and what he sees happening at the execution layer in practice. He also discusses the compliance and audit implications of probabilistic decision-making, arguing that regulated industries will increasingly need tamper-evident, hash-chained audit trails that can withstand scrutiny from auditors and regulators who are only beginning to understand agentic risk, and reflects on a named frontier lab's own published framework as an example of the gap between research and practitioner reality. Elsewhere, David reflects candidly on building a bootstrapped security company in an increasingly crowded market, why he turned down aggressive VC funding to stay in control of the product, and what a credible third-party assessment of his own gateway would need to look like given that Assury sits directly in the execution path for every customer's agents.
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