Earlier this month I attended Vivatech, a huge tech conference in Paris. One fear dominated the discussions: the prospect 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. If “sovereignty” was your word in a drinking game, you’d be pickled within three hours.
In my decades of reporting on tech, I’ve 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’s recent $65 billion fund-raise was more than the entire sum invested in European and UK AI startups last year. Actual results reported by the EU seem to bear this out.
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.
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. Aiden Gomez, the CEO of Toronto-based Cohere, also tried to convey his sense of urgency to the crowd in Evian. “We need to ensure that a democracy occupies the number two position, and that’s not true today,” Gomez told me at Vivatech. “I think the G7 understands that we need a diverse supply chain of AI providers.”
It sounds almost delusional for Europe to think that it can build the world’s 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 “Choose France” initiative has won pledges of over 100 billion euros in AI infrastructure, anchored by Softbank’s 75 billion-euro commitment to build huge data centers in France—pending approvals, of course.
As for collaborations, Gomez tells me that Cohere is trying to stitch together a multinational chain of partnerships, beginning with one with the German AI firm Aleph Alpha. The idea is to pool resources in both engineering and infrastructure for a “sovereign-first” approach. “A few weeks ago, I was with the king of Spain to sign an MOU with Indra, which is the largest tech company in Spain,” he says.
Yann LeCun, the AI pioneer who recently resigned as Meta’s chief AI scientist, is pursuing Project Tapestry, a massive effort among governments and private industry to join forces in building a state-of-the-art frontier foundation model. “The governments of the world all want AI sovereignty,” he says. “The only way I can see this happening is if there’s 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.”
