Europe cannot rent its way to AI sovereignty
When Washington can disable a model overnight, the question is not whether AI is safe but who controls it.
Tl;dr this week, I was asked to share remarks on the risks vs. reward for AI at a gathering of frontier AI lab leadership. I took the opportunity to expand these into an essay on the real AI risk in front of us: not rogue machines, but that everyone outside the US and China rents their intelligence from a landlord who can cut them off. And it still doesn’t look like we’re doing nearly to change this before it is too late…
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A week ago the United States government ordered Anthropic, the world’s most valuable AI start-up, to switch off its most capable model, Fable, for every foreign national on earth - whether they worked for Anthropic or not. This was not an export ban on a weapon sold to an adversary. It was an instruction to disable a commercial product, four days after its release, after officials acted on a claim - which Anthropic disputed as narrow and unproven - that its safeguards could be jailbroken to expose cyber-offence capabilities.
I have spent my career around this technology, first as a graduate student and for the past decade as an investor. In that time I have watched AI move from recommending films to driving cars, speaking with a human voice and editing the genome. I have also watched the debate about its risks settle on only half the question.
That debate is mostly about capability: how powerful these systems are becoming, and whether one might escape human control. Those are real questions. But they are not the only ones, and the Anthropic episode exposed the half we have neglected: access and control. The most advanced AI is built by a handful of American companies, on American soil, under American law, and what the rest of us are permitted to do with it can change on a Friday afternoon. The risk that matters today is not only that AI goes rogue, but that we do not control access to it at all.
Consider what “renting intelligence” now means in practice. A European hospital triaging scans, a bank screening fraud, a defence ministry planning for a conflict: increasingly each runs on an American AI system that’s governed by its export regime. A single directive in Washington cascades, instantly, through every institution wired to that model. We have built core economic and public infrastructure on a supply that a foreign government can switch off. And while there are open-source alternatives, they’re either Chinese or not at the frontier, and building European infrastructure on Chinese open weights trades one dependency for a thornier one.
And these systems are starting to improve themselves. As they do, AI stops being one industry among many and becomes the input to all the others - writing the code, running the research, designing the products and, increasingly, generating the growth itself. Once intelligence is the engine of an economy, a country without a frontier model of its own does not lose a sector; it loses control of the inputs to everything else, and the independence that depends on them. Worse, the gap compounds: capability that improves itself gets harder to chase with every month it runs ahead. This is not a race Europe can plan to enter in a decade. The window to be a builder rather than a buyer is measured in the time it takes to stand up a cluster, not a career.
This should sting, because Europeans invented much of modern AI. DeepMind was founded in London and sold to Google in 2014, and a great deal of the talent that followed now lives in California. Today Europe faces a company worth almost $1tn and American tech giants spending an estimated $450bn a year on AI infrastructure. Its answer has been the EU AI Act and a capital commitment that is a rounding error by comparison. A single American site, xAI’s Colossus in Memphis, runs more than half a million GPUs. Europe has nothing remotely at that scale. The instinct to govern this technology is right, but we’re off on the ambition by orders of magnitude.
It is fair to object that regulation is itself a form of power. But a rule book is not a substitute for the thing it governs. You cannot regulate, or be cut off from, an industry you do not have.
Europe’s instinct, when it is cut off, is not to build but to ask. We saw it within the week. The G7 convened in Évian and floated a “trusted partners” scheme to win back the access it had just lost, while Emmanuel Macron feted Donald Trump beneath the gilt of Versailles, the palace where France once helped midwife American independence. Two and a half centuries on, the dependency has reversed, and the posture is courtship.
None of this means Europe can match the American frontier dollar for dollar. On today’s capital it cannot, and pretending otherwise only wastes the little it has. But the goal is not parity, it is leverage. A country does not need the best model in the world to be sovereign; it needs a credible one of its own, on its own soil, good enough that being cut off is survivable rather than catastrophic. That is the difference between negotiating your access from dependence and negotiating it with an alternative in hand. The point is not to win the race. It is to make sure no one else can end it for you.
Sovereignty of that kind is something you build, and Europe has done it before. The Financial Conduct Authority’s regulatory sandbox, launched in 2016, let start-ups test products with real customers under supervision instead of waiting years for authorisation. The pro-innovation culture it signalled helped make London the fintech capital of Europe, home to Revolut, Wise and Monzo. Government should be AI’s most demanding early customer rather than writing rules for systems it has only ever imported.
Industry has to stop behaving like a tenant. Too many European companies rent the entire stack from American providers and build a thin product on top. That earns a margin and owns nothing: when the lab that supplies you decides to compete with you, or its government decides to cut you off, you have no ground to stand on. Where it counts, build and hold your own models and compute.
And our universities, which should be the source of all this, still work against it. I have argued in these pages before that Europe’s spinout system is broken, and it remains so. Too many institutions treat the companies their research creates as something to extract value from, rather than as the vehicle through which a discovery reaches the world. The best research should leave the building as a company, in addition to a paper.
We keep framing AI safety and AI ambition as a trade-off, as though a country must choose between governing this technology and building it. It is not a choice. The safest position is not the most heavily regulated one. It is the one where the model runs on your terms, in your jurisdiction, and no one on the far side of an ocean can reach over and turn it off. Right now that finger is not ours. Until it is, every other conversation about AI risk is one we are having on someone else’s permission.