Pakistan’s artificial intelligence sector has suddenly grown legs. A Gul Ahmed-linked venture has announced a $230 million Huawei-backed plan to build what is being billed as the country’s largest Tier III data centre. Meanwhile, the prime minister has ordered an AI-driven tax pilot in Islamabad to detect hidden assets and underreported income. Elsewhere in Punjab, budget discussions hint at development priorities now including artificial intelligence, broadband expansion and cloud infrastructure.
However, perhaps to give a sobering reality check, police arrested a man in Bahawalnagar for allegedly uploading an AI-generated obscene video of a female TikToker. The same technology that promises to improve tax collection, strengthen planning and expand productivity is also arriving in the hands of misogynists, blackmailers, and political manipulators with extraordinary tools of harm.
Pakistan needs artificial intelligence. No qualms about that. A country with a narrow tax base, weak public services, low productivity and a young population locked out of global opportunity cannot treat AI as a foreign luxury. If used intelligently, AI can help the state detect evasion, reduce discretion, improve service delivery, monitor pollution, strengthen disaster response, support agriculture, expand local-language learning and build industries around data, cloud and software. For a country that has too often entered technological revolutions late and on other people’s terms, this is an opportunity that should not be squandered. The problem, nonetheless, is that Pakistan is not only importing or building technology. It is importing power. And power, in this country, has rarely been kind to the weak when left without law. This is where the warning from Anthropic matters. The company behind Claude has urged leading AI labs to consider a coordinated and verifiable pause if frontier systems begin improving themselves faster than society can control.
The Bahawalnagar case is a warning written in the language Pakistan understands too well. Much easier than ever before, a woman’s dignity can now be attacked through synthetic media. A society that already blames women for being visible will not need much persuasion to believe a fake video before it believes the victim.
The international dimension cannot be ignored either. Partnerships with Chinese technology firms, Gulf investors, Western platforms and open-source ecosystems can all serve Pakistan’s interests if handled with clarity and confidence. This is not an argument against technological advancement. On the contrary, Pakistan has delayed too long. For years, it has treated technology as something to be imported after the rest of the world has extracted its first advantage from it. That habit must end. The country now needs technological bargaining power: the ability to decide which data must remain sovereign, which systems require local auditability, which contracts demand public scrutiny, and which capabilities must be built at home.
Digital sovereignty should not mean shutting the door. It should mean entering partnerships with the confidence of a state that understands the value of its own data, market and people. *