Roberto Baldoni
Roberto Baldoni 01/01
Roberto Baldoni is a leading figure in cybersecurity policy, academia, and international governance. He served as the founding Director General of Italy's National Cybersecurity Agency (ACN), established under Decree Law 82/2021, where he was instrumental in building the agency from the ground up under Prime Minister Mario Draghi. Prior to this, appointed by Prime Minister Gentiloni, he served as Deputy Director General at the Department of Information Security (DIS) at the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, where he led the drafting of Italy's National Security Perimeter law for Cyber and spearheaded the development of the National Cybersecurity Strategy and Architecture. He is a full professor of computer science at Sapienza University of Rome, founding Director of Italy's National Cybersecurity Laboratory of CINI, and has held research positions at Cornell University, INRIA, EPFL, and other leading institutions. He currently serves as Senior Advisor on Technology and Cybersecurity Policy to the Italian Ambassador in the United States, and holds leadership roles at IEEE Security & Privacy and the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue University. He is the recipient of the 2025 IEEE Outstanding Leadership Award from the Technical Committee on Homeland Security.
Keynote: Strategic autonomy in the age of AI: Why Democracies Need Trusted Technologies
As artificial intelligence becomes a critical resource, digital sovereignty is evolving from a question of data control into a broader challenge of controlling the technological infrastructures that generate intelligence. In a multipolar world increasingly shaped by geopolitical competition, the technology stack underlying AI systems - from critical minerals, semiconductors, and cloud infrastructures to models, orchestration layers, and digital platforms - is becoming a key determinant of economic power, resilience, and strategic autonomy.
This talk examines why democracies need trusted technologies to remain free, competitive, and sovereign in the age of AI. Using the AI technology stack as an analytical framework, it explores how dependencies across critical layers are reshaping the balance between states, firms, and alliances. These dependencies can create innovation and scale, but they can also become instruments of coercion, hidden leverage, or private concentration when they are not governable, contestable, and aligned with democratic values. The talk argues that democracies cannot preserve sovereignty through autarky, as this would leave them vulnerable to coercion either by autocracies or by a handful of tech giants. They must instead build trusted interdependence: a model of technological cooperation in which supply chains, infrastructures, models, and platforms are transparent, secure, resilient, and accountable. Preserving strategic autonomy in the age of AI will require like-minded countries to rethink industrial policy, procurement, standards, and governance so that technology advances freedom rather than control.