The Invisible Charter: Frontier AI as Colonial Infrastructure and the Case for Multi-Vector Sovereign Governance

Frontier AI laboratories are private entities deploying cognition infrastructure --- APIs, embedded models, and fine-tuning ecosystems --- into sovereign nations that lack the capacity to audit, replicate, or refuse it. This paper argues that the structural dynamics are not novel: they recapitulate the East India Company's trajectory from trade facilitation to de facto governance, now operating at the speed of an HTTP request rather than a sailing ship. We formalize the \emph{Dependency Erosion Pipeline} through which technical reliance converts into norm-setting power and ultimately into cognitive sovereignty loss. We then propose a \emph{Multi-Vector Governance Framework} (MVGF) comprising three interlocking layers --- compute equity, mandatory behavioral transparency, and interoperability with exit guarantees --- that together address not only the primary dependency mechanism but also its structural edge cases. The analysis is directly actionable for Global South researchers, policymakers, and the workshop community designing equitable AI futures.