Vana Sits Down With Singapore’s Leaders on the Future of AI
Singapore has already decided that AI runs on trusted access to people's data. At the Tanglin Club, hosted by the MIT Club of Singapore, the question from senior business leaders and government officials was how.
Singapore's refreshed National AI Strategy makes one of its ten priorities to unlock datasets, underpinned by strong data governance. The strategy says the challenge is no longer making more data available, but giving the right people trusted access to the right data, with safeguards, for the four national AI Missions in manufacturing, financial services, connectivity and healthcare. Parliament has already gone further. The Personal Data Protection Act carries a data portability obligation: a person can ask an organisation to send their data straight to another, in a form the receiving organisation can read. The right exists in law. The method is what the country is working out.
Vana is the open network where personal data moves with the permission of the person it belongs to, and a record of every move. Vana wrote the standard for how personal data moves, now hosted by the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust.
We sat down with the MIT Club of Singapore at the Tanglin Club, with senior business leaders and government officials around one table. The conversation kept returning to three things.
Keeping data under Singapore's jurisdiction while letting it move
A country's data is most useful when it stays under its own laws and its citizens' consent, and can still go where it is needed. On Vana a person grants a specific use of their data, for a specific purpose, for a specific time. The grant is recorded and can be revoked. The data moves without leaving the protections the country has set. That is AI a country runs on its own terms rather than on whichever platform holds its people's context.
Opening the market to new players
When data is trapped where it was created, only the incumbent can build on it. When people can move their data, anyone can compete to serve them better. Singapore's economy is built on being open to new players. Its data infrastructure should be too.
Fitting with the identity infrastructure Singapore already has
Singapore has some of the most advanced digital identity infrastructure in the world. Identity says who you are. Vana says what you permit. Together they let a person carry their data into any service they choose, and take it back when they want.
Where Vana fits
The standard Vana wrote does what Singapore's portability obligation asks for: a person's data goes from one organisation to another, with their permission, in a form the receiver can use, with a record of what was agreed. Because the standard is open and owned by no single company, a regulator can point to it and a company can build against it. Governments are already scoping national implementations. The Vana network is where that data moves today: more than 100 apps built by its community, 1.5 million users and more than 20 million transactions.
Singapore is investing more than S$1 billion in public AI research through 2030. That investment pays off fastest where AI can draw on real context from real people, moved with their permission, on infrastructure the country controls. We look forward to continuing to work with sovereign governments and with organisations like the MIT Club of Singapore to lead the way data moves in an AI world.