How Europe can save a trillion euros and win AI race

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On June 12, the US Department of Commerce informed Anthropic that it had to secure an export license for any foreign person, inside or outside the US, to access its two most advanced AI models. This left the firm with no choice but to disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for everyone, with no advance warning. While the US lifted the order on June 30, apparently satisfied that Anthropic had addressed the security risk, European businesses, governments, and researchers had by then spent 18 days using older models, with no knowledge of when they might regain access.

As Europe processed the realization that its access to frontier AI could be revoked at any moment, another development sent a very different message. The Chinese lab Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 — a 2.8-trillion-parameter model whose weights are now free to download — pointing to the possibility that near-frontier capability may soon cost almost nothing. Given the impossibility of knowing which of these conflicting signals will prove accurate, European policymakers now must build an AI strategy suitable for both scenarios.

Current discussions of Europe’s AI strategy largely rest on the premise that policymakers must choose one possibility and go all in. Some want to bet on the Chinese signal: AI capabilities will plateau, the distance between the frontier models and their pursuers will narrow, and AI will become a commodity that can be purchased cheaply, much like electricity. This camp advocates a kind of hopeful resignation: Accept that Europe lacks........

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