Earlier this month I participated Vivatecha huge technology conference in Paris. One fear dominated the discussions: the prospect of being stuck with American artificial intelligence trained on American values. While the United States and China are locked in an AI arms race, France and Germany, which believe their engineering talent is unrivaled, feel left out. Not only are they demanding to be heard, but they are also touting plans to remedy the situation. If your word in the drinking game was “sovereignty,” you’d be pickled within three hours.
Over my decades of reporting on technology, I have covered many of the efforts that countries are making to replicate the Silicon Valley effect. While there have been many individual success stories, no country or market has come close to the ecosystem and mindset that gave rise to companies like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. While investors are throwing tons of cash at American companies, Europeans are getting relative crumbs. One statistic I heard several times last week was that Anthropic’s recent $65 billion fundraising is more than the entire amount invested last year in European and UK AI startups. Actual results reported by the EU seem to confirm this.
Nevertheless, discussions about sovereignty at Vivatech were filled with hope. Optimists cited significant recent funding, collaborative efforts, and next-generation technology that may not be as resource-intensive as leading huge language models. Several of them cited the wild card that could be the biggest boon to European technology in decades: Donald Trump.
Vivatech coincided with the G7 conference in Evian-les-Bains, France, where French President Emmanuel Macron delivered a lecture to AI executives on sovereignty issues. He said that if the United States continues down the path of nationalistic AI, France will take action go alone. Aiden Gomez, CEO of Toronto-based Cohere, also tried to convey his sense of urgency to the crowd at Evian. “We have to make sure that democracy takes a backseat, and that is not the case today,” Gomez told me at Vivatech. “I think the G7 understands that we need a diverse supply chain of AI suppliers.”
It almost seems like an illusion to think that Europe can build the world’s second-best AI. More than 20 countries would have to work closely together, overcome their continental impulses to stifle innovation with bureaucracy, and attract unprecedented sums of investment. First of all, Europe must move from a risk-free to a moonshot mentality. However, Macron has made some progress. His “Choose France” initiative raised over €100 billion for artificial intelligence infrastructure, anchored by Softbank Commitment of EUR 75 billion build huge data centers in France – pending permits, of course.
In terms of collaboration, Gomez told me that Cohere is trying to put together an international chain of partnerships, starting with one with the German artificial intelligence company Aleph Alpha. The idea is to combine engineering and infrastructure resources to adopt a “sovereign first” approach. “A few weeks ago I was with the King of Spain to sign a memorandum of understanding with him Indrawhich is the largest technology company in Spain,” he says.
This continues with Yann LeCun, an AI pioneer who recently stepped down from his position as Chief AI Scientist at Meta Tapestry Projectwhich is a massive effort by governments and the private sector to join forces in building a state-of-the-art border foundation model. “All governments in the world want AI sovereignty,” he says. “In my opinion, the only way this is possible is if there is an open, free base model on which anyone can build their own specialized assistant that suits their own language, culture, value system and political biases.”