Lately I’ve been thinking more and more about what I like to call sovereign autonomous organizations, or SAOs. Just as immutable protocols can operate indefinitely — independent of regulation, their creators, or powerful external actors — I believe we will see the rise of entities whose behavior is enforced by architecture rather than authority. The primitives for this already exist: credibly neutral blockchains, immutable protocols, verifiable AI, and zero-knowledge cryptography. The most powerful companies of the future will be sovereign: governed by rules enforced by open-source code that cannot be changed, not even by states. At sufficient scale, this can place them on the same level or even above states in the domains they operate — something traditional corporations cannot achieve by definition. This is also where DAOs fell short: they were decentralized, but not sovereign. Ownership was distributed, but governance (often token-based) remained structurally capturable. 1/2