S is for Sovereignty

I have the very special privilege of being Greek, born and raised in the country where Western Civilisation was also born and raised. For most of my life, the West meant one thing: a settled alliance between Europe and the United States, so stable that my generation grew up treating it as a universal constant.

Then, over the past couple of years, the romance ended. A US administration turned inward and decided Europe was the mother of all evil. It went so far as to float the idea of annexing Greenland from a sitting ally.

And this would make for interesting times for Europe, even if we were not living in an exponential era. But we are: our species is attempting its largest techno-developmental leap yet, an AI-driven singularity, and Europe is dependent for nearly all of it. Dependent on an openly hostile United States not only for its frontier models, but even for the dull office software running every ministry and mid-sized firm on the continent. Dependent, most importantly though, for the silicon and the datacentres that decide who competes and who watches.

If that sounds abstract, look at this month. On a Friday evening, a single letter from the US government barred every foreign national on Earth from Mythos-class, Anthropic's frontier models—the company's own non-American staff included. Unable to filter the planet by passport, Anthropic switched these models off for everyone, worldwide, within hours. No warning and no appeal. A frontier tool vanished from every desk that relied on it, with a pretty terrifying off-switch openly demonstrated.

If Europe is to survive the AI singularity, we need to urgently restore our sovereignty across a number of domains:

• AI frontier models: Invest heavily in open source, even if it means building upon the Chinese open-weights frontier models. They are not Mythos-class, but they are no more than 6 months behind.
• Strategic data infrastructure: Create sovereign solutions to offset the full operational dependence in key strategic areas such as the military, energy infrastructure, and payments.
• Silicon and datacentres: Urgently increase on-soil datacentre capacity and seek alternative or complementary channels for actual silicon across the board (CPU / GPU / RAM).

Sovereignty for Europe is no longer a matter of political pride. It is a matter of actual survival.