At TechBBQ in Copenhagen, investors, founders and operators from across Europe focused on who should control AI, with sovereignty a recurring theme. The annual Nordic conference, which wrapped up August 27, featured panels and informal discussions about how Europe can gain more control over the technology powering AI.
The question of sovereignty was timely after Anthropic's AI models Mythos and Fable became unavailable to users outside Europe earlier this year. That incident led many in the European ecosystem to consider what it means to own the models and infrastructure underpinning the AI wave, rather than renting that power from the US and China.
Ellen de Brever, an angel investor and head of partnerships at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Cellerator, said the theme of agency felt timely as the conversation shifted from what AI can do to what people are willing to let it do. She noted that debates were about human judgment and who stays in the driver's seat.
Signal President Meredith Whittaker spoke on a panel about whether privacy and AI can coexist. She criticised AI assistants and agents being integrated into operating systems, saying the AI era is creating a 'data collection apparatus' and that AI labs use marketing to make people forget about the collateral consequences of acquiring so much data.
Emad Mostaque, co-founder of Stability AI and Intelligent Internet, said sovereignty is the ability to resist power being exerted over you. He spoke about the concentration of power in a few AI labs and said that inevitably every country will be run by AI, and that the person who controls the AI controls the country.