Aidan Gomez

there's a specific kind of person who gets loud about infrastructure, and Aidan Gomez is becoming one of them — not in a cranky way, but in the way that suggests he's been thinking about this longer than the news cycle has.

Gomez is 28, British-Canadian, and co-founded Cohere out of Toronto in 2019 after helping write the paper that introduced the transformer architecture — the foundational technology underneath essentially every large language model you've interacted with. he was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto at the time, working with Geoffrey Hinton's group, and the paper became one of the most cited in the history of the field. so when he talks about where AI is going, there's a specific credibility behind it that isn't just CEO positioning.

what's made him the name worth watching right now isn't the origin story, though. it's the argument he's been making loudly and consistently across the last several weeks — that for democracies, and specifically for European ones, renting AI infrastructure from foreign providers isn't just a cost-of-doing-business decision. it's a national security vulnerability. he used the phrase "digital serfdom" in a Fortune piece framed around G7 leaders, which is a deliberately uncomfortable image — the idea that dependency on American or Chinese AI platforms hollows out a country's ability to govern its own data, its own institutions, its own economic decisions. Europe, he said, risks "total irrelevance" if it doesn't move toward sovereign AI capacity.

this landed with some force because it arrived at the same moment the US restricted access to Anthropic for certain use cases — a reminder that access can be revoked, conditions can change, and the infrastructure you don't own can disappear from under you. Gomez was direct about it: he backed cutting ties with foreign AI providers. that's a significant thing to say publicly, and he said it plainly.

Cohere just tripled its UK footprint with a new London office, which gives the argument a material dimension — he's not just making the case for sovereignty in the abstract, he's building the alternative. the company is explicitly positioned as an enterprise AI provider that isn't American, and that framing has become more commercially useful as geopolitical anxiety has risen. Canada's own national AI strategy is being debated right now, with genuine disagreement about whether it can work, and Gomez has been a visible voice in that conversation too, through the Globe and Mail and elsewhere.

what's notable is the register he's operating in. this isn't a founder doing the usual press circuit. it's someone who helped build the technical foundation of the current AI moment, who then built a company on top of it, and who is now arguing — in front of policymakers and heads of state — that the political economy of AI is as important as the technology itself. Macron's push for democratic AI collaboration, the Cohere expansion into Britain, the Fortune op-eds: they're all part of the same sentence.

the transformer paper didn't ask for credit. it just changed everything. Gomez seems to be making the same bet on the sovereignty argument — that the idea matters more than the moment, and the moment is already here.