Inherited Weights: Measuring the Tokenization Premium and the Sovereignty Cost of Language Models for the Global South
Abstract
Most language models deployed outside the United States and China are fine-tuned descendants of a small number of pretrained families. We argue that fine-tuning leaves the decisive properties of a model inherited from its base: vocabulary, knowledge, cultural alignment, memorized data and license. We contribute (i) an updated, reproducible measurement of the tokenization premium across 31 languages and 7 tokenizers released in 2023-2024, on 27 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with explicit correction for unknown-token collapse. Premiums reach 10x for Amharic in older tokenizers and remain at 6.8x in the newest commercial one; Indigenous South American languages pay between 1.6x and 2.7x under global tokenizers. A vocabulary built from Portuguese lowers the premium for 11 of 13 Latin-script Global South languages relative to every global tokenizer tested, by about 24% for Guarani and Quechua. (ii) An eight-test black-box sovereignty audit that a buyer can run without access to weights. (iii) A regime argument: under energy and liability constraints, accuracy per joule, calibration and selective risk should replace raw accuracy as design objectives, with metrics that abstention cannot inflate. We close with preliminary internal measurements from a non-transformer architecture built around these objectives, reported with their limitations. Data and measurement code are included.
