Why Europe fears America’s AI power

Summary

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The Times Tech Podcast

Episode: Why Europe fears America’s AI power
Date: June 25, 2026
Hosts: Danny Fortson (San Francisco), Katie Prescott (London)
Guest: Judith Dada (advisor to German government on AI, senior partner at VC Fund Visionaries)

Episode Overview

This week's episode delves into fast-escalating European fears about America's dominance in artificial intelligence, sparked by the Biden administration's recent export bans and heightened by warnings from Western intelligence. Hosts Danny Fortson and Katie Prescott unpack the global ramifications of America’s AI “kill switch,” Europe’s scramble for sovereignty, and the existential anxiety permeating the continent’s tech and policy circles. They’re joined by Judith Dada, whose recent narrative report on Europe’s potential AI downfall resonates chillingly with current events.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

European vs American Approaches to AI Sovereignty and Control

• Heatwave Lockdown and Podcast Banter

  • The episode opens with the immense London heatwave, juxtaposing London’s current shutdown with San Francisco’s more typical heat to provide a lively British-American contrast.
  • [03:10] “You can now watch this podcast… Go to YouTube.com, The Times business page, and our listeners can watch you suffer through this.” – Danny

• America’s “AI Kill Switch”: The Anthropic Export Ban

  • The White House banned the export of Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models out of national security concerns, resulting in Anthropic pulling global access, including for US companies and governments.
  • [04:13] Katie: “The White House blocking the use of two of Anthropic's models by foreign powers ... has just brought all of those fears that the White House has a kill switch on tech, on critical tech into reality.”
  • European companies, like BT, lost access to powerful AI tools just as they were starting to deploy them for cybersecurity.

• The Five Eyes Intelligence Alert

  • Five Eyes (an alliance of Western intelligence agencies) issues a stern warning that AI is only “months away” from being able to take down governments.
  • [04:56] Danny, with dry humor: “Yeah, small things. Small things.”

• Lack of AI Sovereignty in Europe

  • In Europe, there is a heightened sense of vulnerability and dependence on American technology.
  • [07:21] Danny: “This whole notion of AI sovereignty, it's not even a thing here [in the US]. America's an insular place ... No one is even thinking about it or talking about it.”

• Interdependence vs. True Sovereignty

  • US tech companies privately acknowledge the sovereignty issue when courting European clients, even as Americans publicly downplay it.

• Geopolitical AI Arms Race (Including China)

  • Restricting Western AI could push organizations toward cheap, increasingly capable Chinese open-source alternatives.
  • [10:25] Danny: “Every time you slow down the western ones ... more incentive for companies like BT ... to download this Chinese model ... because that's basically free and we're not subject to the whims of, you know, Donald Trump waking up one day ...”

AI Talent Wars: Billion-Dollar Moves and Their Impacts

• Key Personnel Exits

  • Major, market-moving defections from Google DeepMind: Noam Shazir to OpenAI and John Jumper to Anthropic.
  • [15:32] Danny: “The news wiped out $240 billion ... its worst day of trading since May of last year ... These are a couple of those core people and now they've switched teams.”
  • Noam Shazir’s backstory includes key roles in transformer architectures and “Character AI,” as well as controversy surrounding a tragic incident involving the platform.
  • John Jumper led AlphaFold, DeepMind’s landmark protein-folding project.

• The Power of an AI “Transfer Window”

  • With only 150–200 key AI researchers globally, each move becomes a market event and a media drama akin to star football “transfer windows.”
  • [19:36] Danny: “It’s almost like the transfer window in football ... It’s such an easy thing to understand ... You’ve lost that guy to your, your crosstown rival ...”

Guest Interview: Judith Dada on Europe’s AI Nightmare

Introduction to "Europe 2031"

• A Narrative Wake-Up Call
  • Judith and co-authors wrote “Europe 2031: What Getting AI Wrong Means for Us” as a story to spark an emotional connection with policymakers—eschewing dry statistics for a character-driven, near-future scenario.
  • [25:30] Judith: “We felt like nothing was changing ... so we asked ... What is it that is required for people to start forming an emotional connection with the future?”
  • The narrative features a young German AI founder who flees to Silicon Valley and his friend, a Brussels bureaucrat, painting Europe as caught between stagnation and global AI superpowers.

The Stakes: “The Most Ambitious Political Agenda Since WWII”

• Exponential Pace and Historical Underestimation

  • [27:02] Judith: “AI is the technology to supersede all other technologies ... There's no way to protect our social welfare systems if you don't have a seat at the table when it comes to AI.”
  • Europe underestimated both the exponential speed and the societal reach of the AI revolution. Now, years (not decades) may remain to catch up or risk irrelevance.

• Europe’s Policy Response: Panic or Paralysis?

  • Even senior policymakers admit the story’s scenario rings true, but domestic political crises could paralyze real action.
  • [32:10] Judith: “We have had reach outs from state secretaries ... up to chancellor, prime minister levels ... But unfortunately, I’m almost seeing the opposite momentum where people are too scared ... I worry that we won’t see enough forward momentum.”
  • She warns that “going where it hurts” is essential—public readiness for tough policy trade-offs is currently lacking.

The Procurement Dilemma: Buy European or Buy the Best?

• Sovereignty as Interdependence (Not Autarky)

  • [36:12] Judith: “You want to harness the entirety of models that exist, but ... secure access to the frontier ... sovereignty above all [is] ridiculous ... it’s not going to lead us to results required or necessary.”
  • Insisting on solely European tech could create catastrophic vulnerabilities, especially in critical infrastructure and defense.

• A Call to Action Beyond Crisis

  • [38:35] Judith relates an industry CEO’s belief that only catastrophe will spur Europe to act: “The wagon needs to crash ... before we can make meaningful change.”
  • She argues for “becoming AI-pilled”—truly internalizing what is at stake—so Europe acts before disaster strikes.

Tone and Memorable Quotes

• [28:37] “At the end of the day, we don’t think there is a way to defend the European people if you don’t have a seat at the table when it comes to AI.” – Judith Dada
• [29:17] “...if you think about AI as a digital workforce, there’s just this other workforce that has all these superpowers and no matter what, they’re kind of like the Power Rangers. And here you are fighting with your flip flops. It’s quite an uneven race.” – Judith Dada
• [39:36] “I always wonder, like, when did we get so unambitious about the future?” – Judith Dada

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• [04:13] Katie Prescott: “The White House blocking ... Anthropic’s models ... brought all those fears that the White House has a kill switch on tech into reality.”
• [15:32] Danny Fortson: “John Jumper ... won a Nobel Prize for AlphaFold ... Noam Shazir ... one of the authors of the famous Attention paper underpinning the entire generative AI boom.”
• [29:17] Judith Dada: “If you think about AI as a digital workforce, there’s just this other workforce that has all these superpowers ... And here you are fighting with your flip flops. It’s ... an uneven race.”
• [32:10] Judith Dada: “Our countries are so mired in political instability ... Are we going to break through ... to actually do something pretty dramatic here?”
• [36:12] Judith Dada: “A strategy where we say it’s just sovereignty above all ... I think is ridiculous ... it’s not going to lead us to results required or necessary.”

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Segment Timestamps

• 03:31 — Shift to main topic: sovereignty, AI ownership, the White House/Anthropic ban
• 04:13–05:56 — The White House Anthropic export ban explained and implications for European businesses
• 07:21–08:58 — Contrasts between US and European perspectives on AI sovereignty
• 15:32–20:18 — AI talent wars and their market and cultural impact
• 23:00 — Judith Dada interview introduction
• 25:30–29:17 — Why the “Europe 2031” scenario was written as a story; Europe’s underestimation of AI
• 32:10–34:12 — Reactions from policymakers and Judith’s doubts about decisive European action
• 35:00–36:12 — European procurement dilemmas: why “buy European” is not always best for sovereignty
• 38:35 — Will only catastrophe spur Europe to act? The challenge of “AI-pilling” policymakers and the public

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Conclusion and Closing Thoughts

The episode ends with the hosts reflecting on Judith’s call to “go where it hurts”—the need for tough, proactive choices in policy and industry, instead of waiting for catastrophic events to force everyone’s hand. The discussion draws parallels between the eerily prescient “Europe 2031” narrative and real-world developments, echoing both anxiety and urgency as Europe grapples with the possibility of being left behind in the global AI race.

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For further details and links, listeners are encouraged to check out Judith Dada’s “Europe 2031,” and to join the discussion at [e-mail].

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Transcript

[Danny Forston]

This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by health and life insurer Vitality, your health's best friend. Most of us want to be healthier, yet life so often gets in the way. Vitality's health and life insurance is built around that reality. Get active, look after yourself and you can unlock rewards from some of the UK's top brands and help keep your insurance premiums low. It's insurance that works for you. By using tech and insight to understand your health, they can incentivize you to live better. The healthier you get, the more more you are rewarded. Find out more at vitality.co.uk. this episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by IBM.

[Katie Prescott]

Wimbledon is one of those rare events that feels steeped in tradition. But behind the scenes, it's also a huge data operation.

[Danny Forston]

Millions of fans follow the tournament across time zones, devices and platforms. And increasingly they want highlights, stats and personalized updates in real time.

[Katie Prescott]

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[Danny Forston]

It's a useful example of AI being applied in a way people can actually see and understand.

[Katie Prescott]

To learn more about how IBM helps create smarter business, visit IBM.comwimbledon.

[Danny Forston]

Hello and welcome to the Times Tech Podcast. I am Danny Forston and out here in Silicon Valley.

[Katie Prescott]

And I'm Katie Prescott covering all things tech here in the city of London. The hot city of London. Dan, you're really lucky I'm here. Actually, everything, everything is being cancelled. London is in total lockdown because of the heat. You remember what it was like living here, don't you?

[Danny Forston]

I do.

[Katie Prescott]

It's. It's absolutely horrible. Actually, it's almost 36 degrees as we're recording this. Schools are shut.

[Danny Forston]

Hold on, hold on. We have American listeners.

[Judith Dada]

Sorry.

[Katie Prescott]

Okay, Americanize this. Which is probably your daily temperature.

[Danny Forston]

Exactly. It's like. I think that's in the 90s. Hold on, I'll check while you continue to.

[Katie Prescott]

Okay, so, well, what it means is though, over here, schools are shut because people are worried about the kids in classrooms with no air conditioning. People are being told not to travel except for essential purposes. And. And you're like this. Oh, the lse, the London School of Economics has just cancelled an extreme heat conference because of extreme heat.

[Danny Forston]

It's too hot for extreme heat conference.

[Katie Prescott]

But it is, it is amazing. It feels like the city's in lockdown.

[Danny Forston]

It's 97 degrees for our US listeners.

[Katie Prescott]

What does that mean for you?

[Danny Forston]

It's hot. It's a hot day. But cancel everything that feels extreme. Aren't you guys like stiff upper lip? Like, come on.

[Katie Prescott]

As I say, you're lucky I'm here.

[Danny Forston]

Wow. Well, thank you for soldiering on. The listening public thanks you the one

[Katie Prescott]

stiff upper lip alone in South London. We should remind you you can now watch this podcast.

[Danny Forston]

Yes.

[Katie Prescott]

As well as listen to it.

[Danny Forston]

Stop right now. Go to YouTube.com what is it? The Times business page and our listeners can watch you suffer through this. It's just like this is like performance art.

[Katie Prescott]

I have got a fan on Very Gently, which hopefully no one will notice. Apart from the heat, we're also going to be talking about the huge debate that has blown up here about sovereignty and the ownership of AI. Not something that's new, but something that is just hurtling up the agenda like nothing else at the moment. Particularly.

[Danny Forston]

I can't wait to hear about this because obviously for a long time people have been worried about America's AI dominance. And we've spoken on the POD numerous times about what it would mean if the White House had control, like real control of AI.

[Katie Prescott]

Yeah. And what's happened is the White House blocking the use of two of Anthropic's models by foreign powers which led to Anthropic pulling them has just brought all of those fears that the White House has a kill switch on tech, on critical tech into reality and shown really that when it wants to, it can. And the latest news in this saga is a warning from Five Eyes, which is the alliance of Western intelligence agencies. And they've said in what they describe as a call to action, AI is just months away from potentially taking down governments. So we're going to get into that today.

[Danny Forston]

Yeah, small things. Small things. Yeah. And it's, it's obviously it's a very powerful technology. And what is also kind of come through this week is that just how few hands are at the controls and not just companies, but really people. And it leads to the other story we're going to talk about at the top here, which is the talent wars between the AI labs. This week a couple of leading researchers defected from Google DeepMind to OpenAI and Anthropic and it wiped out hundreds of billions of dollars. Just two guys walking across the street led to hundreds of billions of dollars off of Alphabet's stock market capitalization.

[Katie Prescott]

And we're going to be talking about all of this, the question of sovereignty and AI ownership with our guest Judith Dada, who's an advisor to the German government on AI transformation and a senior partner at the VC Fund Visionaries, and she has written this extraordinary report. Well, it's actually more of a story on what losing the AI race could mean for Europe, and she published it just a week before that. Anthropic News. So it's really been the talk of the town here. Yeah, fantastic timing. It's an extraordinary piece of writing and we're going to be talking to her shortly. But first, let's talk about this latest development in the saga between Anthropic and the White House. So just to go back, when the White House put this export ban on Anthropic's two leading models, Mythos and Fable, it was really saying, we think these are too powerful and we don't want them to fall into foreign hands. What Anthropic had been doing was rolling them out really slowly to a small group of people, a small group of organizations, so that they could use them to look at where their cyber threats were. These models were so powerful, they were finding holes in their systems and allowing companies to patch them. And as the White House had made this decision to put the block in place which led to Anthropic withdrawing them because they said, actually, we can't block this. It doesn't work with national frontiers. So we have to pull the whole thing. Companies such as BT here in the UK were starting to get access and use them. So.

[Danny Forston]

Right.

[Katie Prescott]

That move, as you can imagine corporations here, has caused a huge amount of concern. But then we've had this announcement from Five Eyes subsequently, which is just talking about the acceleration of the AI threat.

[Danny Forston]

You say that this whole idea of AI sovereignty had been like a massive issue out there. Here, it's a very different picture because I will say it, and I don't know if it's clear from over there, but Anthropic was forced to cut access to their new model, Fable, to every everyone, including in the U.S. right. And so that's how we care about out here. You know, like, this whole notion of AI sovereignty, it's not even a thing. Like, it's just, you know, America's an insular place and Silicon Valley is an insular region inside a very insular country. You know, no one is even thinking about it or talking about it. And it's so interesting to hear you be like, over there, it's like, this is the thing that people are freaking out about.

[Katie Prescott]

But what is interesting is I had a drink with someone from one of the Big US tech firms last week who was over in London speaking to customers here. And they are certainly very, very conscious of it when they're trying to sell to Europe and trying to convince European governments, customers here that they're taking this seriously, that there isn't going to be some sort of kill switch on their technology. If people buy from them, they're going to partner with people here. They're talking about when it comes to data centers are two key system potentially. So one key is held by the company, one key is held by goodness knows who else. They don't really know how it's going to work, but it's certainly something. I think that yeah, American companies might not be a point of discussion with you, but it's. I feel like they are, they're very cognizant of.

[Danny Forston]

It reminds me of like those 80s movies when it was like all the Cold war movies where you had the nuclear switch and you had to have two people had to put a key in at the same time and then turn it.

[Katie Prescott]

Yeah.

[Danny Forston]

It's just really interesting because you have these companies that are rolling these things out and everybody's kind of having these like spasms, these freakouts and then everybody kind of relaxes. You know, it was like the same thing with when a few months ago when Anthropic came out with Mythos and be like, this is like a cyber security super weapon. And they had this, you know, this group of companies who could get them to go out and test it and kind of use it before wider release. And then they just released it, you know, a couple months later with guardrails. But it's really hard to understand how this is all going to shake out because you have basically Anthropic OpenAI who are just in this like death match for dominance. They both filed for to go public, so they have a huge profit motive. And then you have all these governments be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You're creating these things that are, can be used as super weapons. We don't really know what to do here, so we're just asking you to slow down. It's just a big, it's a big mess. And then the third bit is much cheaper, very increasingly capable Chinese open source models which are free of course. And so you have this geopolitical competition as well every time you slow down the western ones. And it's, it's more of an incentive for companies like BT or whomever to be like, maybe we should download this Chinese model and kind of put our own guardrails on it, use our own data and use that instead, because that's basically free and we're not subject to the whims of, you know, Donald Trump waking up one day and being like, I don't like this.

[Katie Prescott]

And that's exactly why you can see the collision of these two things. The restrictions around Mythos, plus the five eyes warning, which says, guys, you all need to take this really seriously. It says, this is not a future consideration. It's already here. It's not just something that tech people need to focus on. It is leaders, it is boards. Act now. Make sure you're familiar with the threats and companies saying, well, how can we do that when we don't have access to the technology that was going to enable us to make sure our systems were safe? I should say it's interesting speaking to people in the US And I'm sure you've heard the same thing. This wasn't necessarily a decision by the White House against Europe, against other countries. It was the only lever they had to pull when it came to stopping these models.

[Danny Forston]

And they pulled it in America, too.

[Katie Prescott]

And they pulled in America too. And, well, Anthropic pulled it for everyone because they said, we've got us, you know, we've got Canadian citizens in our who are working for us. We've got all sorts of people from everywhere. We can't guarantee that this is just restricted, right? So it's, it's really, really scary. And as you say, what's happening in China as they rapidly keep up means that I'm sure BT is not going to turn to China. But, you know, people, people are kind of looking for, for the tech wherever they can get it, which is, interestingly, actually what Judith writes about in her essay. I mean, so much of what she wrote about, it feels like it's coming to pass. I wonder if she's got some weird crystal ball.

[Danny Forston]

I'm really looking forward to speaking to her because it's also this collision of just Silicon Valley mindset and the rest of the world. This move fast and break things, just run as fast as possible, build the thing as fast as possible, and then worry about the consequences, and then ask the hard questions after you've already built it. And I will say that, you know, Both Anthropic and OpenAI have been making noises of like, hey, we're. This is concerning. We should have regulation, et cetera. But no one has said, we're going to slow down, we're going to stop.

[Katie Prescott]

You've met Dario. Dario, the boss of Anthropic there's been a certain amount of criticism of him over the past week or so. I saw Yann Lecun, for example, on LinkedIn, one of the people saying, ha, you got your comeuppance. You've been warning about the dangers of this technology. Now it's been pulled. Whose fault is that? I wonder what you think about that and whether you think Dario is, is a scaremongerer for marketing purposes, which is almost what people are saying, and he's, and he's got a bit of karma that's come to him or he genuinely believes it.

[Danny Forston]

I guess the only thing I would say is like, you know, that sounds potentially right until the thing, until, like the event happens, whatever that event is. Until, like some, some bad actor uses anthropic mythos to a. Claude Mythos to shut down the water supply or, you know, crash the electrical grid or do something really crazy or build a bioweapon. And so it's a really, it's a, it's an interesting kind of strategy because it's like, let me, let's tell you about all the horrific ways this thing can be used, which all feel like, almost science fictiony, like, you know, Bond villain style, but, but it's not happening yet, so you can't prove that it will happen. But it's like this very, this very effective way to kind of scare people into being like, oh, my goodness, what's going to happen here? You know what I should do? I should actually buy anthropic stuff because I, I need this, the latest, the greatest, the most powerful system. And obviously they, they have gone, it was worth saying, from effectively $0 in sales three, three and a half years ago to a $47 billion run rate, which is like, unprecedented in the history of capitalism, to invent something and go from zero to almost $50 billion in sales in less than four years. Like, that's crazy.

[Katie Prescott]

Should we move on to our next story?

[Danny Forston]

Yes, yes. So this is all related, right? These kind of very big existential questions. And then it comes down to the

[Katie Prescott]

people building this thing who are also all related, basically. I mean, not literally.

[Danny Forston]

Indeed, indeed.

[Katie Prescott]

It's the most incestuous industry I've ever covered. Someone described it at Founders Forum as Shakespearean.

[Danny Forston]

Yeah.

[Katie Prescott]

Because all these people have worked together in the past. They know each other.

[Danny Forston]

Yeah. And they just hop from one lab to another. So, yeah. So the other story this week, two leading AI researchers, Noam Shazir and John Jumper at Google DeepMind, have announced that they are leaving the company to respectively join OpenAI and Anthropic. And the news wiped out $240 billion, which I think is about 2% of Alphabet's stock market. Hahaha. Which was its worst day of trading since May of last year. So over a year. So bad day for Alphabet. And it leads to the question of like, okay, who are these guys? So John Jumper, he's done. Okay. Won a Nobel Prize for AlphaFold.

[Katie Prescott]

So AlphaFold was their key protein folding program which just unlocked a world of drug discovery and was one of their kind of DeepMind's key moments. Really?

[Danny Forston]

Yeah, like a real kind of like signpost in the kind of progress of AI. So he's a very big deal. He was that DeepMind for best part of a decade and now he's left. Noam Shazir, he was VP of engineering and co lead of Gemini at Google. He's gone to OpenAI and he was one of the authors of the famous Attention paper, which developed a transformer architecture underlying the entire kind of generative AI. Boom. And he is also, I must say, probably most important on his resume, friend

[Katie Prescott]

of the podcast, Friend of the pod. Yeah, I'm sure that's right at the top.

[Danny Forston]

Yeah, I'm sure it is. So he was at Google for many years. He left. He was frustrated with the pace of change and the pace of innovation, so he left. He started his own company called Character AI, which was this kind of early iteration of a chatbot, kind of like humanized chatbot. And it kind of had a moment, it was growing fast, it raised a bunch of money and I had him on and it was really interesting and I was like, what are you using this for? And he was kind of like, I don't know. We just built it and we put it out in the world and see what people started using it for. And it was like an early indication of where AI was going in certain ways because he's like, a lot of people are using this thing and it was like a pretty kludgy, clunky interface. But even so he's like, people are using it as like a therapist and as a friend. Fast forward. Very tragically, a teenager was on Character AI and ended up taking their own life. And the company was sued by the, the child's parents being basically like saying this machine coached our child toward to suicide. There was a lawsuit, I should say that lawsuit by that family, Character AI. And Google settled it with the family in January of this year. Google ended up bringing Noam Shazir back in house and so then he was back in house for the last couple years and now he's gone again. But it just shows you, you know, Jensen Huang, I think, said something last year along the lines of basically there are 150 to 200 people who really matter when you're building these with these systems. And John Jumper and Noam Shazer are two of them. So that is why, you know, if you step back and look at Mark Zuckerberg paying a billion dollars to hire one guy, that is what is happening here. You know, these are a couple of those core people and now they've switched teams.

[Katie Prescott]

It's interesting, isn't it, because there is a lot of movement in the AI world and there's a huge amount of a war for talent going on. How much can you say this is what's going on at Google and how much is it? Well, actually, these guys, you know, looking for their, their next move for, for whatever reason, but because of their importance, that has an instant impact on the share price because people are looking for signs of, you know, well, actually if they'd rather be somewhere else, what does that say about where they are already?

[Danny Forston]

It is funny though, it does make me think like, Alphabet is like, you know what, the third or fourth or fifth biggest company on the planet. They have a whole data center arm which is bringing in hundreds, I think, or at least many tens of billions of dollars in sales. It's a big old empire. But we're treating these 150 to 200 people. It's almost like the transfer window in football. People get so attached because it's such an easy thing to understand of like, oh, you've lost that guy to your, your crosstown rival or whatever. But there's obviously for Alphabet in particular, they've got a lot more going on than just like losing two guys.

[Katie Prescott]

Well, our guest today will be able to speak to all of this after the break. We'll be speaking to Judith Dadda. She recently co authored a report or a story about what the world will look like in five years if Europe doesn't start pulling up its socks when it comes to the AI race. And it's pretty scary stuff. That's in just a moment. This episode of the Times tech podcast is sponsored by health and life insurer Vitality, your health's best friend. Vitality works differently. Get active, build healthy habits and you can unlock rewards from some of the UK's top brands while helping to keep your premiums low. It's award winning health and life insurance that helps you live healthier Find out [e-mail] Today's episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by IBM.

[Danny Forston]

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See Paloa's AI agents in action at parloa.com that's P A R L O A dot com. Hello and welcome back to the Times Tech Podcast. Our guest today is Judith Dada, who's an advisor to the German government on AI and a senior partner at VC Fund Visionaries. But she has been making headline news across the tech world in the UK and Europe recently for a paper that she co authored, or it's actually really more of a story called Europe 2031 what getting AI wrong means for us. And it tells the tale of what will happen to Europe if we don't start taking AI seriously through the eyes of a German AI founder who flees to Silicon Valley and his friend Caroline, who is a Brussels apparatchnik, for want of a better word, who is staying in Europe. And the sort of conversations between the two of them, it's pretty scary stuff. So the picture she paints of the US and China winning leaving Europe behind is a lack of COMPUTE in Europe, restrictions on the use of US AI models sounding familiar, decimation by cyber attacks, and then eventually a continent which just becomes totally trapped between China on one side and the US on the other side is forced to pick. And that leads to mass unemployment, economic collapse, riots and irrelevance. So a happy tale, an unusual tale. We don't see many AI reports like this and I guess, you know, we see lots of AI reports, so it certainly grabbed attention. So it's a scenario which felt scarily true suddenly a few weeks ago when Trump blocked the rest of the world's access to anthropics. Two new models. And it has served as a bit of a wake up call for European policymakers.

[Danny Forston]

And there's an audio version as well, so why don't we Hear a clip? January 2025. Caroline Dubois office is buzzing. At 28, she's been there for three years and feels she is earning the respect of her peers and superiors. But she, unlike them, is seriously worried about Europe's future. The deep sea news has not reassured her. She has recently visited Silicon valley. It is 9,000 km from Brussels. But it feels further. The idea that AI is sparking a new industrial revolution is a truism. In California, in the European Commission offices, it is bordering on science fiction.

[Judith Dada]

Wow.

[Katie Prescott]

Judith, welcome to the Times tech podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.

[Judith Dada]

Thank you so much.

[Katie Prescott]

Great to be here. I mean, it gives listeners a flavor of this. Well, it's not really a report, is it? Not quite sure how you describe it, but why did you decide to write this and why did you write it like that, like a story?

[Judith Dada]

So the author group I connected by one feeling, which was that we've all read reports, we've all seen statistics, and we felt like nothing was changing, at least not enough was changing. And so we asked the question, well, what is it that is required for people to start forming an emotional connection with the future, for people to start understanding in very concrete terms how the future of Europe and the future of Europe with AI might play out. And we thought that, you know, let's write this like a sci fi story and we call it a narrative scenario. Let's create these characters that to us feel very relatable because we've kind of either been them or have interacted with them in some way, shape and form. And let's really make this as concrete as possible in order to really shift the cultural language of how people are discussing AI.

[Danny Forston]

I found it totally fascinating, as Katie said, every other day it feels like we get a report that's trying to connect with people and it just kind of all is just a bit of a mess, a bit of miasma. But when you look at what you guys wrote, if you step back, what you're calling for is, I think the way you guys put it is the most ambitious political agenda since the end of World War II. That is what we are faced with or you are faced with in Europe. Why do you think that is the case? Because that feels dramatic. So I'd love to just understand why you think those are the stakes.

[Judith Dada]

It feels dramatic because we believe that it is dramatic. We believe that AI is the technology to supersede all other technologies and all other kind of events. At the end of the day, we don't think there is a way to defend the European people if you don't have a seat at the table when it comes to AI. We don't think there's a way of protecting our social welfare systems if you don't have a seat at the table when it comes to AI. And so everything at the end of the day leads back to AI. Now, Europe is in a situation where over the last couple of years, we have massively underestimated the magnitude of this technology. We believe it's going to be very similar to the Industrial Revolution. It's going to be somewhat similar to electricity. It's going to be the infrastructure that our social fabric, our lives, our economy is going to run on. We've underestimated the speed at which this technology is unfolding, at which it's happening. It's very much exponential. And we kind of thought we had decades when really we think we have years. And then the kinds of people who have been speaking about this technology and shaping it very much are kind of centered in Silicon Valley. And then also China and Europe is deeply skeptical and in many ways, for the right reasons of Silicon Valley, of maga, and a lot of the trends there. But unfortunately, we have therefore, you know, kind of dismissed a lot of the messengers that have actually been telling the truth about how this technology is unfolding. And because they kind of said, you know, a. We figured that, you know, kind of the opposite of a must, therefore be true. And so if you take those things together, we've just vastly underestimated, you know, kind of the transformation that is going to come our way. But at the same time, we need to find a way to kind of step back from that and say, if we don't get this right, it doesn't matter how much effort and work we put into all the other things. It is the technology to supersede everything else.

[Katie Prescott]

I saw you speaking at London Tech Week the week that this report came out with. I think you were on stage with George Osborne now OpenAI, and the AI minister as well. When you released this, it just went off like a bomb across the industry. And I guess particularly because it dropped that week when everyone was together, you really felt the impact. It was what everyone was talking about. But just a week later, it felt like everything you set out in the report, all the terrible scenarios came true. When that White House export ban was issued against anthropics models, did that surprise you, that event? Or was it, you know, as predicted in the story?

[Judith Dada]

We wrote the story because we very much believed that the things that we talked about could very well become true. But we didn't plan for it to be like a predictive timeline. And then when that happened, obviously I still remember I was in bed. Every young daughter, she was awake at 4am in the morning. And I just checked my ex, well, you shouldn't be doing it. 4am in the morning. Wait, here I was and I saw this and I just, my mouth fell open and I couldn't. And I was texting the group of authors and I was like, this is happening. What are we doing? This is crazy. So we were very much not expecting this. But I do actually think, irrespective of how the situation gets resolved, and I think it's still very much up in the air. And I want to say that in the author group we take security and safety very seriously. So we do think there may be reasons in the future to restrict access to models, to make sure that we kind of safely deploy them and so on and so forth. But what we are really afraid of is a world in which the technology that is going to be so powerful is going to be asymmetrically available to some countries, some nations, and not to others. And I think that was because it was on the basis of the export ban that the White House then reacted and it was very much based on foreign nationals versus versus U.S. citizens. That was exactly what we had been fearing because the world, I'm an investor, invest in companies who use these models to be competitive, who build their products and so on and so forth. And just the idea that you're working kind of crazy hours and you're giving your all, but you might just be out competed because there's a different company that just has more powerful models that you can't get access to. It's kind of this idea like if you think about AI as a digital workforce, there's just this, this other workforce that has all these superpowers and no matter what, they're kind of like the Power Rangers. And here you are fighting with your flip flops. It's quite an uneven race. And so it makes me laugh saying it. It sounds funny, but it's actually very, very serious. And so that's exactly what we kind of tried to predict in the scenario. And then we were all quite surprised. But in many ways I think also grateful is not the right word, but I think it's an important wake up

[Danny Forston]

call you come away with. I think it's five recommendations and one of them is almost like a. Not quite like a Marshall Plan, but basically like a European kind of everybody come together. Like we need to invest on a level with what is happening in America where there's like best part of a trillion dollars going into the ground just this year for data centers, for infrastructure, all of that stuff. And the overriding sense is that at least that you guys appear to have is that effectively Europe is luggage on this train that is being driven by America. And I have no sense of this because I'm over here. The people that matter, have they reached out like, what has been the response of like, yes, this is a wake up call between this, between the export ban, is it like, oh, okay, we need to kind of actually do something pretty dramatic here.

[Judith Dada]

It's not just the broader public that has read the scenario, shared the scenario, you know, why didn't large, but it's also a lot of the important decision makers. So we have had reach outs from state secretaries. It's gone up to kind of, you know, chancellor, prime minister levels in various countries. Our countries in Europe are so mired in, in a political instability, you know, hugely unpopular governments, you know, kind of a lot of economic stagnation, you know, kind of still a lot of, you know, kind of the populist forces that are tearing, you know, at the seams of not just the European unity, but really also kind of the national unity. And so what I'm most worried about is that no matter all these outreaches and all the interesting conversations and people saying, politicians saying they've listened to it several times and they really worry that everything is going to come true kind of exactly as we wrote it. Are we going to break through the Overton window enough? Are we going to kind of break out of this business as usual, politics as usual enough in light of the poly crisis that very much every single government is facing. That is my biggest concern because I do think counterintuitively, a moment where you start so stretched and where in many ways, how much more can you lose? Because already everyone's not really leading in the polls. I think that's the moment when you should be taking maximum risk. I think that's the moment when you really say it's kind of now or never. But Unfortunately, I'm almost seeing the opposite momentum where people are so scared to now take a step out of line that I worry that we won't see enough of a forward momentum. Another willingness to, to truly go to where it hurts. A lot of the focus of Europe 2031 is on trade offs, where we say, you can't tell the public that this is all going to be roses and butterflies and it's going to be easy peasy. No, it won't be. And we need people who on the one hand speak the truth, say that this is going to require everyone, it's going to require industry, it's going to require families, individuals, schools. Everyone needs to carry their fair share of this transformation. But at the same time that there is a massively better world and better story for all of us on the other end.

[Katie Prescott]

One of the scenes that really stuck out for me was when you describe a model slicing through Europe's cyber defenses like tissue paper. And I was describing it to Danny earlier. Companies opening their systems and finding cyber wallets on them because they've been hit by a massive cyber attack. And the reason for that is because Europe told its businesses to use European companies. So you focus on this idea of procurement, which has come out from Europe in the last month or so, which is rather than using US tech, they need to focus on homegrown tech. And it seems that what comes out from your story is actually that's not the way to go.

[Judith Dada]

We don't believe in sovereignty as auto key, but sovereignty as the ability to ensure the continued thriving of your people or kind of sovereignty as interdependence as we would call it. And I always want to differentiate because I think there's a couple of things that get mixed up in this conversation about kind of frontier, non frontier models. I think there's a very valid case for a lot of the business transformation that's going to happen. Right? A lot of great AI use cases don't need the most powerful model. Not everyone needs access to fable to answer a simple HR request at time the same same time there's certain, I call them like front lines or very vulnerable systems. Think defense, think infrastructure, think cybersecurity, where if there's a model that is a closed model, that a nation has access to it and you know, kind of certain bad actors get access to it and you don't have access to the same model for defense, then even a six month or three month, you know, kind of lead may lead to a very, very big attack surface that I quite personally like, don't feel comfortable with. You know, we've got. We've got nuclear reactors to cool, a lot of critical infrastructure. Really, it's absolutely pivotal that we're able to protect these systems. And so I would think about.

[Katie Prescott]

And so people should use the best. Is what you're saying, the best tech rather than European.

[Judith Dada]

Exactly. You want to harness the entirety of models that exist, but you want to still make sure that you are in a position to negotiate access to the frontier, to secure your most critical infrastructure. And so securing access to the frontier, I'd love for Europe to be able to build that front frontier homegrown. And we've got amazing companies who are trying. But we do think that any policy, any serious policy that has sovereignty and the kind of security of the European people at its heart and its core needs to at least contend with a scenario in which no matter how much money we throw at the problem now in terms of catching up with the frontier labs, it may not succeed. And for that scenario where it may not succeed, what are we doing? What's our plan B? What's the leverage that we've built? What are kind of the little chips that we've built in our corner that we can start trading in to ensure that at least for these critical systems, we don't have this kind of asymmetric attack surface relative to other nations. And so I think a strategy where we say it's just sovereignty above all, and let's just now all completely only procure sovereign technology, I think it's just. Quite honestly, I think it's ridiculous. I think it's just not going to lead us to the kinds of results that are required or necessary to truly have sovereignty in mind.

[Danny Forston]

Makes me kind of. Because especially being out here on the west coast and, you know, the train is going 100 miles an hour here, but then you go out into the world and you look what's happening in Europe, and it feels like. It feels like the kind of. The powers that be institutions are kind of addicted to the status quo of just kind of like there's this, like, sense of complacency. And it's like, we're just going to let this happen to us. Because as a cynical journalist, I'm like, no one's gonna proactively, as you say, go to where it hurts unless there is an event. Right. I always feel like people always, like, are very reactive and we've had an

[Katie Prescott]

event, to be fair. Yeah. I think a mythos isn't a.

[Judith Dada]

The question is, was it big enough

[Danny Forston]

yeah, I'm just wondering, like, again, because you've had these reach outs from all these people in the corridors of power, is that what you think is going to have to happen, like something terrible? And hopefully I don't want that to happen. But, you know, something or something really dramatic where everybody kind of sits up and goes like, oh, we have to change course here.

[Judith Dada]

I just had lunch with a big European industry CEO and he kind of made exactly that case. He said it just, you know, the wagon needs to crash, you know, full on before we can kind of, you know, make the meaningful change. I mean, we built L and D terminals out of thin air. But it took unfortunately for Russia to invade Ukraine for us to realize that, okay, this is probably a good idea. So what I, what I want to say is, and this is very much what we were hoping with the scenario, I do think, and we call this kind of becoming AI pilled. There is a group of people who, you know, because they've kind of, they've seen a future that they can't unsee, do actually feel the urgency in every single fiber of their body and can kind of align their lives with that new reality, they kind of can't unsee it. I think everyone in the author group has had that moment and we were hoping for this story, you know, through this story for more people to have that realization. They think very much when we call it the San Francisco consensus. Like when you go to San Francisco, kind of people just feel it, know it, believe it, with everything they have there. They just know that this is what's going to happen. And I don't think enough people in Europe have had it. Even though the scenario was, you know, like, successful in terms of, like, reach, I don't think it's maybe, you know, quite enough to get us there. I always wonder, like, when did we get so unambitious about the future? You know, kind of right now it's mostly about, you know, averting this, averting that we should all be like, looking forward to the future. We should be like, hey, lucky you, you know, to get to be alive at this very moment in time. And like, so anyway, so, you know, finding that ambition again and then having the, having the consequentialness of actually aligning your life and then taking the action to, to make that go well, I don't think that's happening quite enough yet. And I would hope that there's more work other than like a big crisis that's going to allow us to do that before stuff hits the fan.

[Katie Prescott]

So there you go. I've been talking a lot about the strength of feeling here, but hopefully that really came through.

[Danny Forston]

It really did.

[Katie Prescott]

Yeah, Totally came through. Yeah. It is all anybody is talking about.

[Danny Forston]

The things she said that I think is the kind of. It's such a good way to put it. And I think it's not only applicable to Europe, but also here is like, go where it hurts. And like, we all have to go where it hurts if. Unless you just want to just like let this thing wash over you or push you out of the way or whatever. But the idea of like making some hard decisions before you feel like you have to make them, rather than waiting for some kind of event or mass unemployment or whatever all these big fears are. But to try to put things in place and make hard policy decisions to set yourself up in a better position rather than just waiting for the thing to happen, I thought was really an interesting point.

[Katie Prescott]

Well, the whole narrative scenario felt far fetched. Until it didn't.

[Danny Forston]

Yeah, it's like all good science fiction where you're like, it actually is a predictor of the future in a real way.

[Katie Prescott]

We have hit the hottest tune day on record. Where? Wiggenholt, West Sussex. So far, 35.8 Wiganholtz. I love beating Charwood.

[Danny Forston]

I love the names of British towns and villages.

[Katie Prescott]

Wiganholtz, Hertfordshire Water park is closed to prevent visitors getting burnt on the slides.

[Danny Forston]

Isn't there water on the slides? Isn't that the whole point? I feel like. Come on, y', all, come on.

[Katie Prescott]

It's going all together. My goodness, it's extremely hot.

[Danny Forston]

To Judith's point. Come on, go to where it hurts, you know, go to where it hurts. Go to the. Go to that water park. Right, that is it for this week's episode of the Time Sec podcast. If you're enjoying the show, drop us a line to let us know.

[Katie Prescott]

And we'd love to know your thoughts on today's discussion as well. All those points about sovereignty where you're at stands on AI and is it even a contender in the AI?

[Danny Forston]

Yes. So tell us by emailing us@techpod thetimes.co.uk and we will see you back here next week. Hopefully it's a bit cooler there, you know, life has reopened because it's. Yeah, exactly. Heat lockdown will have ended. Fingers crossed until next week. Bye bye.

[Katie Prescott]

Bye bye.

[Danny Forston]

Today's episode of the Times tech podcast was sponsored by IBM.

[Katie Prescott]

IBM's long running work with Wimbledon shows how AI and data can be used in a setting millions of people recognize.

[Danny Forston]

From instant match insights to digital tools like Match Chat and Likelihood to Win. The aim is to help fans follow the tournament in a more personalized way, whether they're on the ground or watching. From anywhere around the world and beyond

[Katie Prescott]

sport, it points to a bigger question for businesses. How do you turn data into something useful, timely and easy to act on?

[Danny Forston]

To learn more about how IBM helps create smarter business, visit IBM.comwimbledon this episode

[Katie Prescott]

of the Times Tech Podcast was sponsored by kpmg.

[Danny Forston]

One of the themes we keep coming back to is the gap between AI ambition and real world application and that's

[Katie Prescott]

where KPMG is focusing its work, helping organizations move beyond pilots and think about how AI can change the way the business operates and how it fits into wider processes and decision making.

[Danny Forston]

You can find all their insights and how they can help your organization make the difference through successful AI workforce adoption. Visit kpmgco.ukai.