The future of Europe may well have been signed away last year. It wasn’t done on the battlefields of Donbass or Kursk. While the new Trump administration finalises plans for a $500 billion cash injection into American AI development, and China shakes up Silicon Valley with DeepSeek modelling, Eurocrats are planning to regulate the unregulatable in hopes of granting the old Continent some fleeting relevance.
Billed as the EU’s attempt to get ahead of the AI bonanza before being put at another strategic disadvantage, the aptly titled “AI Act” aims to codify international guidelines for the technology in lieu of the old Continent having the technological firepower to compete with Silicon Valley.
Establishing a mandatory grading system for AI technology, and aiming to establish the whip hand of the state over the regulators, the Act is expected to come into effect over the next two years.
The Act demands fines of up to 7 per cent of global turnover on companies who refuse to impose EU-defined risk analysis on their products — mimicking ongoing attempts by Brussels to foist European hate speech laws on Big Tech through the Digital Services Act (DSA).
Marketed by Brussels as the GDPR of AI (that is a way for the EU to maintain international prestige by giving itself the regulatory first mover advantage) the success or failure of the AI Act may come to define the Continent for the next decade.
In essence, the EU wishes to play economic hardball with AI titans in California and further afield, weaponising its 450 million person strong common market as both a carrot and stick to bend AI companies to its will. The cosy post-war world of European social democracy is coming to an end as Ukraine and an ongoing migration crisis underline the fact that the walls are closing in on the bloc. The potential mismanagement of the AI revolution could be a fatal kick in the geopolitical groin.
Europe is already something of a digital ghetto with Google, Amazon and Clearview AI holding back from entering the EU market with some of their new products due to a multitude of regulatory hoops for them to jump over.
The temporary pain is worth it, argued Macronist Commissioner Thiery Breton — the brainchild of the AI Act who argued that Europe must use its aggregated economics of scale against U.S. startups in a form of digital Gaullism hegemonic among Brussels elites.
Regardless of the geopolitics or economic pitfalls of the AI Act, what was noticeable following the legislation through the halls of power in Brussels was the concern shared by the EU establishment almost above all else:
Will the AI be racist?
Fears of AI technology cementing racial bias or worse still being utilised for border security seemed to haunt every session of the EU Parliament concerning the Act with a slew of pro-migration NGOs from Amnesty to Soros-funded ENAR network haranguing MEPs to alter the proposals to include anti-racist clauses.
“Lawmakers must ban racist profiling and risk assessment systems, which label migrants and asylum seekers as ‘threats’; and forecasting technologies to predict border movements and deny people the right to asylum,” opined Amnesty’s Mher Hakobyan with the organisation establishing a special AI division so great posed by the technological revolution.
While many of us fear for a world where the AI rollout is bungled and, for example, erodes job security even further, the prospect of AI becoming racist is a key concern in the NGO class. An early harbinger of this came in March 2016 when Microsoft was forced to pull the plug on its Tay chatbot after a matter of hours as the proto-AI personality, buoyed on by social media trolls, began posting inflammatory white nationalist rhetoric.
In the end the lobbying assault was successful with Eurocrats inserting an effective ban on AI being used for migration control, a barrage of regulations to prevent racialised policing as well as transparency mechanisms.
Within weeks of the AI Act clearing European institutions technological shifts had made swathes of the legislation borderline irrelevant as Brussels’ policy think tank Bruegel warned that a new AI arms race between China and America was “bad news for Europe as it unlikely to be able to operate in the two ecosystems, reducing the potential efficiency gains of AI advances.”
While it is probable that non-European autocracies may be using AI technology (rightly or wrongly) to regulate migration flows the next decade European agencies will be hamstrung by these diversity protocols inserted in the dying days of the woke world order.
Comparable to the Soviet Union’s failure to manage computerisation in the 1980s that crippled it in the Cold War race, the EU’s point blank refusal to properly embrace AI warts and all could go down in a defining moment in the bloc’s failure.
Already suffering from an exodus of indigenous tech companies from Europe to the United States JD Vance in addressing this week’s AI Summit in Paris lambasted a complacent European leadership for seeking to drown out 21st century innovation with old world regulation.
Similar to Brussels’ war against Musks’ X platform over content moderation the ideal scenario for the European Commission is to become the de facto global regulator for AI by proxy due to its economic size. The fear for the EU is that AI is too dynamic and prized a technology to be dictated to by Brussels’ beancounters and that the European market carries less and less sway than it did even a decade ago when GDPR was introduced.
The EU was caught relatively unawares by a revanchist Russia in 2022, shattering energy networks and heralding a return to WW1-style trench warfare on its frontier. How will European capitals react in the years to come as even medium-sized autocrats are able to run rings around the Continent using AI?
Despite newfound attempts to deregulate courtesy of Mario Draghi, a combination of Gaullist arrogance and woke inertia have combined to lock out the AI revolution from European consumers.
At a push, you may argue that Europe is being prudent in defending its citizens against novel and often predatory Silicon Valley practices and that the bloc is right to fly the flag on people-focused AI regulation. However, coming at a time when the Trump administration seeks to create a bonfire of DEI regulation adding in effectively woke clauses to Europe’s AI future may be just enough to tip the balance against Brussels.
The EU has suffered the scars of preparing its 2019 to 2024 legislative agenda at the height of the Greta Thunberg-inspired green movement that left Europe ill-prepared to deal with a Russian-energy embargo, growing schism with China nevermind the fallout of the COVID crisis.
The past decade or so “wokeness” has been propelled in the Anglophone world by the alliance between conscientious capitalism and progressive more. At an EU level this takes a different regulatory approach with progressive value systems dovetailing with Brussels’ desires to stay relevant in the world through overregulation.
The world, and certainly the captains of digital capitalism, will not wait for Brussels bureaucrats to set the terms of engagement
While Europe’s failure to establish itself on equal footing to the United States with regards to social media platforms or an abject failure to become energy sustainable haunts the EU at large the crippling of Europe’s AI dreams before they even begin could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back in the multipolar era.
Europe never will or should embrace fully American start capitalist culture, but it is displaying a clear failure to live in the real world when it comes to innovation. Its ability to rest on the laurels of centuries worth of advantage over Asia and the Global South is about to end.
Applying the mindset of a Belgian technocrat to the fast-paced world of AI development is a match made in heaven, even without the diversity clauses that will hamper AI’s impact on Europe. Europe and the European project have strived too long to reinvigorate itself through passive aggressive regulation with the AI Act and its parallel legislation the DSA, the ultimate indictment of such an approach.
The world, and certainly the captains of digital capitalism, will not wait for Brussels bureaucrats to set the terms of engagement — and any belief to the contrary is destined to copper-fasten the Continent’s already shaky future.