Article and Interview by Nathan Gardels: “When he was president of France in the 1960s, Charles de Gaulle intuitively understood that his nation could not be a sovereign player on the world stage during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union unless it possessed its own nuclear weapons.
What was true for France then is true today for the European Union, as China and America dominate AI. The continent cannot achieve strategic autonomy as a sovereign entity unless it joins the club with its own significant capacity.
American Big Tech already dominates Europe, which has struggled to start up its own industry, with the exceptions of the French company, Mistral AI, and the critical Dutch manufacturer of high-end chips, ASML. In the U.S., OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, DeepMind, Amazon, Meta and Nvidia are spending hundreds of billions on AI research and infrastructure. Driven by state investment, China is spending comparative billions and has shown its ability to compete globally through open-source AI models such as DeepSeek.
AI differs from nuclear weapons because it is a foundational technology that will transform all aspects of life. As such, it is not merely a technological achievement, but a cultural project. It is here that Europe’s precautionary temperament clashes with the accelerationist fever of Silicon Valley.
Does this place Europe at a competitive disadvantage that will fatally impede its advance in AI? Or will Europe’s deliberative vigilance save humanity from handing over the keys of the kingdom to intelligent machines?
The core conflict between America and its European geopolitical allies is their differing approaches to AI; the former seeks to “build first, regulate later,” while the latter seeks to “regulate first, build later.”
To explore this divergence within the West, Noema invited two top thinkers on technology to debate the topic. Benjamin Bratton directs the Antikythera project on planetary-scale computation. Francesca Bria is Barcelona’s former chief technology and innovation officer. Their exchange is more polemical than Noema’s tone usually accommodates, an expression of the passions aroused when the stakes are so high….(More)”.
