The Sovereignty Question: Who Governs the Governors?

Every enforcement architecture in AI governance meets one structural limit — the sovereign will of a state for which the technology has become an element of strategic autonomy. Drawing on the IMF/Uzbekistan reforms of the 1990s, the NPT and SWIFT precedents, the live Anthropic–Pentagon dispute, the Strait of Hormuz crisis, the October 2025 Chinese rare earth licensing cycle, and Uzbekistan's Resolution No. 109 of March 2026, this essay isolates the first structural limit on any attempt at correction: sovereign override, operating within a window shorter than any prior sovereign conflict. Essay 9 of the series Beyond Control: Theory of Limits of AI Governance by Oybek Khodjaev (INVEXI LLC, Tashkent, Uzbekistan). Full text: https://okhodjaev.com/essays/the-sovereignty-question/