{"id":80214,"date":"2026-06-26T15:12:29","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T15:12:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/80214\/"},"modified":"2026-06-26T15:12:29","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T15:12:29","slug":"europe-is-fed-up-and-wants-its-own-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/80214\/","title":{"rendered":"Europe Is Fed Up and Wants Its Own AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this month I attended Vivatech<\/a>, a huge tech conference in Paris. One fear dominated the discussions: the prospect<\/a> of ending up stuck using American AI, trained on American values. While the US and China are locked in an AI arms race, France and Germany, which consider their engineering talent second to none, feel boxed out. Not only are they demanding to be heard, but they are touting plans to address the situation<\/a>. If \u201csovereignty\u201d was your word in a drinking game, you\u2019d be pickled within three hours.<\/p>\n

In my decades of reporting on tech, I\u2019ve covered multiple efforts by countries to replicate the Silicon Valley effect. While there have been plenty of individual success stories, no country or market has come close to matching the ecosystem and mindset that gave rise to companies such as Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. While investors throw boatloads of cash at American companies, Europeans get relative crumbs. One statistic I heard several times last week was that Anthropic\u2019s recent $65 billion fund-raise was more than the entire sum invested in European and UK AI startups last year. Actual results<\/a> reported by the EU seem to bear this out.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, sovereignty discussions at Vivatech were infused with hope. Optimists cited significant new funding, collaborative efforts, and next-generation technology that might not be as resource-intensive as the leading large language models. And several cited a wild card that might be the biggest boon to European tech in decades: Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Vivatech overlapped with the G7 conference in Evian-les-Bains, France, where French president Emmanuel Macron lectured AI executives on the sovereignty issue. If the US continued down its path of nationalistic AI, he said, France would take steps to go it on its own<\/a>. Aiden Gomez, the CEO of Toronto-based Cohere, also tried to convey his sense of urgency to the crowd in Evian. \u201cWe need to ensure that a democracy occupies the number two position, and that’s not true today,\u201d Gomez told me at Vivatech. \u201cI think the G7 understands that we need a diverse supply chain of AI providers.\u201d<\/p>\n

It sounds almost delusional for Europe to think that it can build the world\u2019s second-best AI. More than 20 nations would need to work closely together, overcome their continental impulses to strangle innovation with red tape, and lure unprecedented sums of investment. Most of all, Europe must shift from a risk-adverse mindset to a moonshot mentality. But Macron has made some progress. His \u201cChoose France\u201d initiative has won pledges of over 100 billion euros in AI infrastructure, anchored by Softbank’s 75 billion-euro commitment<\/a> to build huge data centers in France\u2014pending approvals, of course.<\/p>\n

As for collaborations, Gomez tells me that Cohere is trying to stitch together a multinational chain of partnerships, beginning with one<\/a> with the German AI firm Aleph Alpha. The idea is to pool resources in both engineering and infrastructure for a \u201csovereign-first\u201d approach. \u201cA few weeks ago, I was with the king of Spain to sign an MOU with Indra<\/a>, which is the largest tech company in Spain,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Yann LeCun, the AI pioneer who recently resigned as Meta\u2019s chief AI scientist, is pursuing Project Tapestry<\/a>, a massive effort among governments and private industry to join forces in building a state-of-the-art frontier foundation model. \u201cThe governments of the world all want AI sovereignty,\u201d he says. \u201cThe only way I can see this happening is if there\u2019s an open, free foundation model, on top of which anybody can build their own specialized assistant for their own language, culture, value system, and political biases.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this month I attended Vivatech, a huge tech conference in Paris. One fear dominated the discussions: the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80215,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9347,78,43272,66,4,46],"class_list":["post-80214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-europe","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-backchannel-nl","tag-donald-trump","tag-europe","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80214\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}