AI Without Backdoors

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:10

   Hi everyone. Um, so today I would like to speak with you about that digital sovereignty in the agentic era. I don't know if you've heard of this uh but earlier this month uh we had the French police read on ex in the Paris headquarters and the rationale behind this is that the government wants to fight hate speech since Macron our president is now at an all-time low in popularity it worries about the people speaking freely on X and so the

2. 0:44

   government blames X recommendation algorithm which supposedly encouraged the rise of radical opinions. So they want X to open their code for them to check the algorithm for potential bias. Of course, Ellen is uh refusing it for intellectual property reasons uh but also for user privacy. And so Elon Musk is called in the French court to explain himself in April.

3. 1:15

   And um like this is not the first time we are seeing something like this. Uh some months ago uh maybe you remember this but the telegram CEO Pavl Dof was arrested in France for refusing to open a back door in its app. So I would like to bring attention to um this this fact that even a safe platform can become a threat for its users if the government if in a change of governance at the time where more and more people

4. 1:48

   will communicate their daily life in their AI assistant. I bet that soon the government will try to get its hands on it. And we have a very concerning uh recent history of data leaks in France. If you look for example in September France which is the official uh job uh job market uh in France exposed 340 uh,000 job seekers personal data. Next month in October we had multiple sport federations that leak IDs, contacts and photos of millions of member. In

5. 2:24

   November, one health insurer leaked health record data of 5 million patients. December, the interior ministry breach exposes 70 million police records. We've had uh a lot of policemen, women having to move of their house because their family were potentially at risk by by this breach. In January, 45 million French voter registries and healthc care data exposed. This is crazy because

6. 2:56

   nowadays the population is France is about 69 million. So it's probably about 60 to 70% of the whole population of the country whose data has been leaked through this hack. Later in January, uh service public affair which is a platform for accessing uh it's the official platform for accessing public services also leaked 2.1 million IDs and residency and uh in February this month a hacker used the seal servant credential to steal 1.2 million accounts

7. 3:29

   in national bank registry with eban names, addresses and tax IDs. So at this point I really think that we should not trust our government to take care of our data and so there is an urgency to to update our security model from the don't be evil to a can't be evil.

8. 3:52

   If we think of uh the current architecture and uh why it fails to protect our data this is more or less how it works nowadays in the usual uh app architecture. A user will send data on the platform. Uh this this data will be stored plain text in a centralized database or in a cloud and uh the government is provided a backdoor access for the investigations it needs to um by time to time. The issue is that malicious users would use this back door

9. 4:25

   or directly steal from the government uh for surveillance on citizen or uh different uh potential attacks. At Nova, I'm building an architecture with end to end encryption. So the user would uh encrypt their data locally. The data transits by the platform uh which doesn't access it. The data is uploaded and encrypted in uh a decentralized storage and uh the the key to decrypt this data is stored in a shade agent in a TE. So

10. 5:03

    it makes it impossible for malicious users to uh steal uh the data of the user. [clears throat] And so I'm building Nova as an SDK uh to make it easy for anyone to add a private vault to their app in a few lines of code. So today more than ever before digital sovereignity appears as a public good especially for crypto investors because making crypto data public makes investors at risk physically and

11. 5:39

    financially. I will start by speaking of our neighbors in Netherlands uh and the financial vulnerability uh their new uh tax represents. So Netherlands just voted for a 36% unrealized gains trap which in itself uh is a bit absurd because most of crypto investors will have to sell their investments to be able to pay the tax they are being asked every day every year. Sorry. But this is even more worrying because

12. 6:12

    this tax will uh will demand everyone to share their wallets and transactions history and uh publicly with the states. And if we consider usually in Europe uh we tend to standardize low from one country to another but the French context is very special uh in this uh in this scope. Sadly France has become a global capital for crypto kidnapping.

13. 6:45

    We had 44 kidnapping uh attacks since 2021. onethird of worldwide attacks uh in 2025 was in France. We are only two months into 2026, but we have we have already recorded 14 uh crypto kidnapping attacks and with a breaking record of four attacks in 24 hours.

14. 7:13

    So why is digital sovereignty a public good? Well, essentially because it protects us from such vulnerability. And I think that we should all be very concerned that the upcoming AI platform will make these attacks impossible by being totally blindfolded on their users data because we don't want our chatload everything we do on the internet, we don't want it to go in the state database that will potentially represent a risk for their users.

15. 7:44

    So this is my major statement with Nova. Um, today I'm calling all builders in the crypto industry to build apps that can't see their users data. I'm available if you want to speak more about Nova. I will hang uh hang around all the day. So, please feel free to reach out and uh I can tell you more about what I'm doing. Thank you very much.