That’s a fair point, I’ve put a lot of focus on the below point out of Europe 2031, but there may be other interpretations
Europe cannot build this alone, and should partner with American providers on terms that keep the infrastructure under European jurisdiction and secure guaranteed access to frontier AI.
I'd be happy to help you if you have a more specific question. For me, the most relevant facts-based claim in the article is here:
The third is a geopolitical crisis born of the Trump administration’s simultaneously ideological and commercial assaults on a European Union it is bent on destabilising — whether by aligning its policy with that of American corporations (in March 2025, Donald Trump barred American companies from applying the European duty of care directive) or by imposing its views on the Commission in the framework of trade “negotiations.” And it does so to effect: the opening of fresh “Omnibus” fronts throughout 2025 — beginning with the “Digital Omnibus” aimed at rewriting the digital rules barely adopted in 2024 — is inseparable from the massive mobilisation of the major American tech companies, long highly active in Brussels lobbying, whether directly or through employer bodies such as DigitalEurope. To that must be added the American administration’s direct interventions, through its diplomatic representatives in Brussels, calling for a suspension of the AI Act’s implementation.
This shows that Europe 2031's main proposals for preventing the "AI-induced decline of Europe", deregulating the AI sector and fast-tracking data center permitting, are being actively lobbied for by the Trump administration and the Big Tech lobby, which makes it unintuitive how Europe 2031 suggests those same measures as a bulwark against American pressure.
The normative claim made further in the article, is that this deregulatory activity is the sign of a weak Europe conceding legislative territory to powerful interests, and that the way towards a stronger Europe is to defend against this pressure and uphold the laws that protect European public values.
Good to hear from your perspective, I admit that my views are shaped by my specific academic direction as well.
Feel free to use anything you deem useful!
Some further thinking on the crux of it all: what irks me is that I can concede the general EA case for AI safety (there is a non-zero chance of highly dangerous superintelligence, and this justifies investments in moonshot AI safety ideas), but that the mindset of Europe 2031 hinges on a narrower case, where: a) AI becomes so advanced that it would devastate economies that don't have access to the most advanced model (compare with manageable current-day inequalities, e.g. the West having exclusive access to advanced lithography, Denmark having the exclusive right to produce Ozempic) b) a competing company / country's AI is not sufficiently close in capabilities to mitigate that devastation c) the AI does not become Bostrom-style superintelligent (that would introduce a level of abundance that makes this competition model irrelevant), and d) the probability of all this happening is high enough that it requires drastically reshaping the priorities of Europe's legislation and economy
Thanks for the write-up. You are more patient than I in trying to engage with this in good faith – my initial reaction upon reading the doc is that a policy proposal on EU tech sovereignty that fails to propose anything the likes of Marc Andreessen and David Sacks would disagree with is not an argument made in good faith. I must say that I'm disappointed in many ways by the overall quality – both of the narrative writing and the political modelling behind it – which is why I'm trying to hold myself back from getting nerd sniped into critiquing every little detail in the document. Instead I'll focus on two arguments that could most help fruitful discussion:
The tension between the article's fearmongering about Europe as a US vassal state and their proposed solution of subletting European resources to US AI companies.
The geopolitical argument: is Europe weak or strong as a non-aligned middle power in the bipolar US-China AI buildup?
On the build lots of data centers proposal
Start with the central incoherence: Europe 2023 spends multiple acts dramatizing the horror of vassalage – country-tiered inference, the American AI valve that can be closed overnight, a handful of people in San Francisco and Washington deciding humanity's future. And then its flagship remedy is to build more American infrastructure on European soil, faster: dedicated economic zones, streamlined permitting, partnering with American providers on a vague promise of guaranteed access to frontier AI. "Under European jurisdiction" is carrying a lot of weight in their proposal, but any MP concerned about tech sovereignty would ask how a data center physically located in Ireland or the Netherlands, running US silicon, executing US foundation models, orchestrated by a US cloud hyperscaler and managed by a US tech giant is a worthwhile step towards a stronger Europe. In fact, I'd argue the opposite: fast-tracking data centers doesn't disentangle Europe from the American ecosystem, but sets that entanglement in stone for the coming decades. A relevant excerpt on the actual realities of European digital governance from Antoine Vauchez (source below):
The third is a geopolitical crisis born of the Trump administration’s simultaneously ideological and commercial assaults on a European Union it is bent on destabilising — whether by aligning its policy with that of American corporations (in March 2025, Donald Trump barred American companies from applying the European duty of care directive) or by imposing its views on the Commission in the framework of trade “negotiations.” And it does so to effect: the opening of fresh “Omnibus” fronts throughout 2025 — beginning with the “Digital Omnibus” aimed at rewriting the digital rules barely adopted in 2024 — is inseparable from the massive mobilisation of the major American tech companies, long highly active in Brussels lobbying, whether directly or through employer bodies such as DigitalEurope. To that must be added the American administration’s direct interventions, through its diplomatic representatives in Brussels, calling for a suspension of the AI Act’s implementation.
And its closing note:
[…] the deeper risk is that Europe loses, along the way, its entire capacity to act as a public authority — realising, far more probably, the old Eurosceptic dream of a Europe reduced to nothing more than a market.
This points towards a morbid inversion of Europe 2031's proposals – the relative weakness of European tech is currently being exploited by an aggressive US public-private industrial lobby to effect the exact deregulatory agenda that they proposed.
On Europe as a middle power This is much less my specialty, so I'm framing it as a question for others to engage with. Europe 2031 treats non-alignment in the AI race as pure weakness, but isn't this backwards from how middle powers usually fare in a bipolar contest? One could argue that Europe's strength is in its relations with both China and the US, which are better than US-China relations, as well as its wealth and large single-market, making it an attractive customer to AI companies desperate for steady revenue streams.
So why does the article frame Europe's lack of local frontier AI as complete disempowerment? My sense is that the AI race frame is an assumption underlying the whole deal that does a lot of the work in carrying the argument to fruition. A race has one axis and a linear ranking, so the moment you accept it, a middle power's multidimensional leverage – market access, human resources, industrial capacity – becomes moot as long as it doesn't project them to the top of the leaderboard. Watch what happens to ASML in the story: the one bottleneck both rivals depend on shows up in the final act as a liability, the thing Washington moves to seize, rather than as the strongest card on the table. That inversion feels like an artefact of the frame.
From an epistemic standpoint, I think the AI race framing is worth carefully navigating as effective altruists. Europe 2031 evokes a very two-years-ago view of the AI debate – people who believe in exponential improvement and singularity on one side, people who predict an imminent AI bubble crash on the other. The general position of EA AI safety people is more towards powerful AI than the average academic. I'd argue the AI race framing is a second, independent axis from this debate: whether the race resolves to a clear endpoint with an all-powerful winner, or whether "victory" is multidimensional, ambiguous, and spread across several players. This is an axis on which we, as EA'ers, don't have to take the extreme position by default. You can think AI is revolutionary and still predict the outcome to be a messy, distributed equilibrium rather than a single company in San Francisco flipping a switch. Europe 2031 is firmly convinced of the linear victory condition, but most of the people whose work I read reject this finish-line framing. However, this assumption radically changes the optimal action for Europe to take – staking out a position as a middle power without resorting to vassalization to US tech interests becomes a lot more feasible in a multi-faceted world with several powerful AI operators.
Some additional notes because I couldn't resist:
My impression, as someone who has read both Silicon Valley diatribes and conventional policy documents, is that this document doesn't accurately imagine the actual state of European governance, and harkens closer to the stereotypes of Europe perpetuated in viral Twitter threads. From an epistemic standpoint, EA has historically been about combining the good of Silicon Valley epistemics with the good of academic knowledge; Europe 2031 doing the opposite is a worrying trend.
Specifically, the relation between this article and the current centre-right/far-right push for deregulation through the Omnibus directives is unclear – what should be a clear victory directly relevant to their policy goals is barely acknowledged and tsk-tsked away as "too little too late".
The article shies away from addressing political factions, but this would be an important step to actual political modelling. The deregulatory agenda largely aligns with EPP, Renew and the industrial lobby, but they would not be reliable partners for the delicate balance the article imagines to be needed for the only possible good outcome (keeping firm enough in negotiations to retain European jurisdiction of what's going on in the data centers, without triggering US pressure campaigns to give up strategic advantages like ASML early). Greens/EFA are hard opposed and no effort is made to approach them. Social democrats / unions are interesting swing players here, as they are strong voices in the current tech sovereignty push, and their reluctance to concede on labour matters could be overcome with promises of economic plenty. Yet, the article's writers fail to seriously engage with this political perspective.
defines hype as a political object and discusses its effects on the regulatory agenda. Highly relevant and much better written than my own post. Excerpts: - "Democratic consensus-building is often time-consuming; in the context of digital regulation, this is frequently used to explain the 'legal lag'—the notion that law is slow and perpetually trails behind technical development. Hype works through speeding up processes, urging stakeholders to take hasty decisions. It creates urgency and pressure to act instantly, in contrast with legal thinking that rationalizes through procedural and structural reasoning." - [..] "Current political discussions and regulatory proposals in the context of AI reflect the success of what I call the “innovation narrative” around AI: AI, simply put, means innovation; innovation is desirable without restriction; and regulation hinders it. This narrative is fueled by the misleading picture of an “AI race” among the US, China, and the EU, as well as by the epistemic capture of AI." - [..] "Big Tech companies—paradoxically both warning of AI’s disruptive potential and driving its advancement—exert substantial influence over the production of regulatory knowledge through scientific publications This economic dominance manifests in a subset of regulatory capture that I call "epistemic capture."" - [..] "Europe’s competitive edge lies in leveraging its unique regulatory identity to foster investment in infrastructure and SMEs, particularly within the strategic frontier of industrial AI."
this one's more explicitly left-wing than others, but important to note as it shows clear political goals behind data center opposition that ostensibly well-meaning abundance-type analysts have thus far failed to engage with
That’s a fair point, I’ve put a lot of focus on the below point out of Europe 2031, but there may be other interpretations
I'd be happy to help you if you have a more specific question. For me, the most relevant facts-based claim in the article is here:
This shows that Europe 2031's main proposals for preventing the "AI-induced decline of Europe", deregulating the AI sector and fast-tracking data center permitting, are being actively lobbied for by the Trump administration and the Big Tech lobby, which makes it unintuitive how Europe 2031 suggests those same measures as a bulwark against American pressure.
The normative claim made further in the article, is that this deregulatory activity is the sign of a weak Europe conceding legislative territory to powerful interests, and that the way towards a stronger Europe is to defend against this pressure and uphold the laws that protect European public values.
Good to hear from your perspective, I admit that my views are shaped by my specific academic direction as well.
Feel free to use anything you deem useful!
Some further thinking on the crux of it all: what irks me is that I can concede the general EA case for AI safety (there is a non-zero chance of highly dangerous superintelligence, and this justifies investments in moonshot AI safety ideas), but that the mindset of Europe 2031 hinges on a narrower case, where:
a) AI becomes so advanced that it would devastate economies that don't have access to the most advanced model (compare with manageable current-day inequalities, e.g. the West having exclusive access to advanced lithography, Denmark having the exclusive right to produce Ozempic)
b) a competing company / country's AI is not sufficiently close in capabilities to mitigate that devastation
c) the AI does not become Bostrom-style superintelligent (that would introduce a level of abundance that makes this competition model irrelevant), and
d) the probability of all this happening is high enough that it requires drastically reshaping the priorities of Europe's legislation and economy
Hi Sarah,
Thanks for the write-up. You are more patient than I in trying to engage with this in good faith – my initial reaction upon reading the doc is that a policy proposal on EU tech sovereignty that fails to propose anything the likes of Marc Andreessen and David Sacks would disagree with is not an argument made in good faith. I must say that I'm disappointed in many ways by the overall quality – both of the narrative writing and the political modelling behind it – which is why I'm trying to hold myself back from getting nerd sniped into critiquing every little detail in the document. Instead I'll focus on two arguments that could most help fruitful discussion:
On the build lots of data centers proposal
Start with the central incoherence: Europe 2023 spends multiple acts dramatizing the horror of vassalage – country-tiered inference, the American AI valve that can be closed overnight, a handful of people in San Francisco and Washington deciding humanity's future. And then its flagship remedy is to build more American infrastructure on European soil, faster: dedicated economic zones, streamlined permitting, partnering with American providers on a vague promise of guaranteed access to frontier AI. "Under European jurisdiction" is carrying a lot of weight in their proposal, but any MP concerned about tech sovereignty would ask how a data center physically located in Ireland or the Netherlands, running US silicon, executing US foundation models, orchestrated by a US cloud hyperscaler and managed by a US tech giant is a worthwhile step towards a stronger Europe. In fact, I'd argue the opposite: fast-tracking data centers doesn't disentangle Europe from the American ecosystem, but sets that entanglement in stone for the coming decades. A relevant excerpt on the actual realities of European digital governance from Antoine Vauchez (source below):
And its closing note:
This points towards a morbid inversion of Europe 2031's proposals – the relative weakness of European tech is currently being exploited by an aggressive US public-private industrial lobby to effect the exact deregulatory agenda that they proposed.
On Europe as a middle power
This is much less my specialty, so I'm framing it as a question for others to engage with. Europe 2031 treats non-alignment in the AI race as pure weakness, but isn't this backwards from how middle powers usually fare in a bipolar contest? One could argue that Europe's strength is in its relations with both China and the US, which are better than US-China relations, as well as its wealth and large single-market, making it an attractive customer to AI companies desperate for steady revenue streams.
So why does the article frame Europe's lack of local frontier AI as complete disempowerment? My sense is that the AI race frame is an assumption underlying the whole deal that does a lot of the work in carrying the argument to fruition. A race has one axis and a linear ranking, so the moment you accept it, a middle power's multidimensional leverage – market access, human resources, industrial capacity – becomes moot as long as it doesn't project them to the top of the leaderboard. Watch what happens to ASML in the story: the one bottleneck both rivals depend on shows up in the final act as a liability, the thing Washington moves to seize, rather than as the strongest card on the table. That inversion feels like an artefact of the frame.
From an epistemic standpoint, I think the AI race framing is worth carefully navigating as effective altruists. Europe 2031 evokes a very two-years-ago view of the AI debate – people who believe in exponential improvement and singularity on one side, people who predict an imminent AI bubble crash on the other. The general position of EA AI safety people is more towards powerful AI than the average academic. I'd argue the AI race framing is a second, independent axis from this debate: whether the race resolves to a clear endpoint with an all-powerful winner, or whether "victory" is multidimensional, ambiguous, and spread across several players. This is an axis on which we, as EA'ers, don't have to take the extreme position by default. You can think AI is revolutionary and still predict the outcome to be a messy, distributed equilibrium rather than a single company in San Francisco flipping a switch. Europe 2031 is firmly convinced of the linear victory condition, but most of the people whose work I read reject this finish-line framing. However, this assumption radically changes the optimal action for Europe to take – staking out a position as a middle power without resorting to vassalization to US tech interests becomes a lot more feasible in a multi-faceted world with several powerful AI operators.
Some additional notes because I couldn't resist:
Recommended reading:
- "Democratic consensus-building is often time-consuming; in the context of digital regulation, this is frequently used to explain the 'legal lag'—the notion that law is slow and perpetually trails behind technical development. Hype works through speeding up processes, urging stakeholders to take hasty decisions. It creates urgency and pressure to act instantly, in contrast with legal thinking that rationalizes through procedural and structural reasoning."
- [..] "Current political discussions and regulatory proposals in the context of AI reflect the success of what I call the “innovation narrative” around AI: AI, simply put, means innovation; innovation is desirable without restriction; and regulation hinders it. This narrative is fueled by the misleading picture of an “AI race” among the US, China, and the EU, as well as by the epistemic capture of AI."
- [..] "Big Tech companies—paradoxically both warning of AI’s disruptive potential and driving its advancement—exert substantial influence over the production of regulatory knowledge through scientific publications This economic dominance manifests in a subset of regulatory capture that I call "epistemic capture.""
- [..] "Europe’s competitive edge lies in leveraging its unique regulatory identity to foster investment in infrastructure and SMEs, particularly within the strategic frontier of industrial AI."