Caught between two technological empires, the nations of Southeast Asia are reaching for the same diplomatic instincts that preserved their independence during the Cold War — hedging, balancing, and refusing full alignment. But artificial intelligence is not geopolitics alone; it is capital, compute, and code, and the old tools of neutrality may not be sufficient for a domain where scale determines sovereignty. The region's governments are building local AI models and frameworks, yet remain structurally dependent on the very ecosystems they seek to escape, raising a deeper question: whether au