Comments
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:
- 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.
Recommended reading:
- Hannah Ruschemeier (Tech Policy Press) - "AI hype and the capture of EU AI regulation".
- 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."
- 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:
- Antoine Vauchez (Social Europe) - "Omnibus to nowhere: the quiet dismantling of European Governance".
- stakes out a position directly opposite to Europe 2031
- Frederike Kaltheuner, Leevi Saari (Tech Policy Press) - "Europe’s AI Sovereignty Problem Runs Far Deeper Than Frontier Access"
- direct reaction to the EU 2031 document that at least tries to engage with some of the realities of the EU political playing field
- Dave Karpf - "The data center bankshot".
- 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
Hi Sarah! I have more to say on this, and this comment may sound more dismissive than I intend it to, because I don't have the time right now to respond in full (and I'll be honest: I can't promise I'll make the time later either).
But a few things I'd say for now:
1. The scenario is a story, and all narrative scenarios are. It is not presented as inevitable, otherwise there would be no point in writing it. It's a possible world we could end up in if nothing changes in Europe. The point is not to paint a full analytical picture; the point is to change minds and inspire action. So I don't think it's quite right to hold it to the standard of a rigorous analytical exercise: it's a different tool for a different job. The fire alarm is not the same as the fire-safety report. Of course the questions you raise are absolutely legitimate and important to discuss, but I would put back to you: have you actually seen less of this kind of discussion since Europe 2031 came out? Or has it sparked more debate about how to generate European agency, and what we should use that agency for?
2. The scenario clearly describes itself as having a narrow focus on purpose. The scenario is exclusively about maintaining European agency, and says nothing about how to use that agency once it has been achieved or strengthened. But that is a scope choice, not a statement of what the authors care about. The FAQ addresses your concern almost directly:
3. On power concentration and international coordination: These are super important, but you can't do much about them without agency. Europe being "AI colonized" and losing its agency to a handful of foreign companies and states, is itself one of the forms of power concentration the scenario is trying to get Europe to defend against. Building European leverage is, in part, a hedge against exactly that concentration, as well as a way to gain the agency to combat other problems.
For a nice description of how unreasonably effective this kind of fictional account can be, I'd recommend this post too.
Hey there!
Thanks for responding, and for your honesty regarding time for engagement. If you end up writing out in greater length what you have to say, happy to see an extended version of your response. That said, it seems to me that what you did write already provides good grounds for me to engage, so here's a
quickresponse from my side point-by-point:I think I largely agree to this, actually. That's why I tried to emphasise in my intro, and to a lesser extent throughout the post, that I see my response as complementary: narratives are a good tool to inspire action, but they require attendant analytical exercises to have positive value. Action in an ill-considered direction is worse, I would argue, than no action at all, and definitely worse than reflective action.
The scenario Europe 2031 (in contrast to other narrative projects that make more of an effort to highlight uncertainties and multiple possible futures, see e.g. AI 2040) leaves its readers with a fairly strong conclusion in the Epilogue, one that very much sends the (emotionally charged) message "we know what we need to do, and we should do it even if it is politically painful". The authors offer a more analytical, and somewhat more nuanced / uncertainty-aware, outline of their argument in the Summary, the FAQs that you also (rightly in my mind) cite, and their Compute Forecasting section. But my sense is that many readers will mainly focus on the scenario itself, not the analytical bits on the side; this post here is one attempt to shift that a little bit further in the direction of using the scenario as an entry-point to the analytical discussion, rather than as a shortcut to a seemingly clear conclusion.
You are right, I think, to ask about the actual empirical effects of Europe 2031's publication. The honest answer is (a) that I'm not in Brussels (or another EU hub), so I have a very poor sense of what is being discussed with how much of a truth-seeking intention to it; and (b) I think it's too early to tell. I do think, however, that other people have established quite well how narratives and stories can obfuscate public and policy debates[1]; and that feels enough to at least be worried about Europe 2031 having a similar effect, if we don't try explicitly to counter that obfuscating effect.
That's largely true, but I also think it's a good example of means and ends being hard to separate in practice. "Maintaining European agency" is a means to an end which the authors barely discuss, and I think it's fair for them not to discuss it at length (for the reasons they themselves list in the FAQ, and which you cite above). However, to the extent that their proposal for "maintaining European agency" hinges on instrument that have implications for diverse AI governance aims, I do think they have a responsibility to discuss that; or, at least, I think we should use the scenario as a starting point for discussing these implications. If the scenario's proposal for "maintaining European agency" mainly consists in "massive compute build-outs on EU territory" (and I have confirmed with one of the authors that my reading of that is broadly in line with what they themselves take the main message of the scenario to be), then that is not neutral with respects to "other [deliberately ignored] aspects of the AI transition": such a build-out might accelerate frontier AI development; might further amass power with US frontier AI companies (if, as the scenario suggests, such a build-out would happen under the auspices of these capital-rich US frontier companies); and might undermine EU regulatory standards, which could otherwise be used as a tool in AI governance efforts. It also diverts capital and attention away from other potential European responses to rapid AI developments.
I think my main sticking point here is: I agree that "maintaining European agency" is a worthwhile instrumental goal to strive for, because I too would like to the see the EU as a capable actor in future AI governance developments; but I think that we face many really difficult and politically/normatively meaningful questions when it comes to deciding which strategy to pursue in order to maintain European agency. I want our response to Europe 2031 to be that we discuss vigorously and honestly what different strategies might look like, and what their merits and costs are. I think the scenario itself may not spark these discussions (because neither the scenario nor the authors' supplementary commentary insinuate that there are open questions here at all). So I wrote this Forum post to start filling that gap.
My response to this is largely the same as the one offered above: I think there should be controversy and open discussion around how we can prevent Europe from being "AI colonized", around what it means for Europe to build up effective leverage, and around what we are and are not willing to give up in our attempt to build up such (supposed/potential) leverage. My sense is that Europe 2031 "falls into the same trap"[2] as Anthropic itself did: assuming that a race is inevitable and that the best option is to come out on top (or near the top, in Europe's case), even if that means accepting all of the costs the race brings in the first place. I want for that assumption to be vigorously debated, not taken for granted.
Lastly, thanks for linking the post on the (potential) effectiveness of fictional accounts. I haven't read it yet, but it definitely falls within what I'm interested in and I'm glad to have the link (and also for others visiting this post to have access to the link)!
Here I would insert a reference from the study of propaganda, media studies, or a similar field if I had the time to look for it. I hope to come back to this later this week, but apologise in advance if I fail to. My only excuse is that those fields and their general takeaway - stories influence minds, and not always in an epistemically ideal way - is a sufficiently well-accepted piece of common knowledge that my claim survives without a specific reference (?).
In quotation marks, because it is only a trap given the specific worldview from which I am speaking; one that should, just like Europe 2031's worldview, be vigorously debated and contested!