Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani and Chief Technology Officer and Office of Technology & Innovation (OTI) Commissioner Lisa Gelobter announced the launch of "Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crew," a new initiative to deploy teams of technologists alongside City agencies to tackle public problems with in-house digital solutions at Coney Island in New York City on July 13, 2026. Credit: Katie Godowski/MediaPunch /IPX

Cities and States Can Replicate NYC’s Ambitious Public Interest Tech Crew

This image is a collage with a colourful Japanese vintage landscape showing a mountain, hills, flowers and other plants and a small stream. There are 3 large black data servers placed in the bottom half of the image, with a cloud of black smoke emitting from them, partly obscuring the scenery.

Deborah Lupton, "Servers in a Landscape" / 

Is Open-Source AI Really the Dangerous Path?

Telegram on App Store displayed on a phone screen and French flag displayed on a screen in the background are seen this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 3, 2023. 

(Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via AP)

What a Growing Telegram Disinformation Network Reveals About the DSA

A woman waves a European Union flag in the wind.

The ‘Sovereignty’ Narratives That Don’t Help Europe

Kherson, Ukraine—Lenka Klicperova, journalist and photographer, covers the war in Ukraine. October 19, 2022 Jose Hernandez/Shutterstock

Kherson, Ukraine—Lenka Klicperova, journalist and photographer, covers the war in Ukraine. October 19, 2022 Jose Hernandez/

What It Now Takes to Establish a Fact

Editorial collage in black, white, and blue showing a megaphone emerging from a laptop screen and a hand holding a microphone, surrounded by ribbons reading 'NEWS' and scraps of newsprint.

How Cyberattacks Became a Censorship Tool

OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman speaks with reporters as he departs a meeting with Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) on Capitol Hill on July 29, 2026. (Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images)

The OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident Demands Urgent Congressional Oversight

Nine small images with schematic representations of differently shaped neural networks, a human hand making a different gesture is placed behind each network.

Can AI Agents Be Aligned with Human Rights?

The X logo is being displayed on a mobile phone with the European Commission logo seen in the background, in this photo illustration. Taken in Brussels, Belgium, on 8 December 2025. (Jonathan Raa / Sipa USA) (Sipa via AP Images)

X's Data Access Remedies Are a Win for Researchers Only If They Last

A person holds a Mastercard debit card near a mobile phone with a contactless POS terminal in Athens, Greece, on February 15, 2026. (Photo by Nikos Pekiaridis/NurPhoto via AP)

(Photo by Nikos Pekiaridis/NurPhoto via AP)

Pakistan’s Banking System Holds a Lesson for Social Media Age Verification

A view of the Barlaymont European Commission building in Brussels, Belgium on July 20, 2026. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via AP)

 Brussels Gains New AI Act Enforcement Powers as Autonomous AI Tests Regulators

The EU flag with an image of the X logo. 

What X's Corrected Action Under the DSA Fixes on Data Access, and What's Left Open

OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman is seen in an elevator after a meeting with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Capitol Hill on July 29, 2026. (Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images)

Advanced AI Is Ultrahazardous. Let’s Treat It That Way

Inside the frame of a mobile phone screen, a woman is depicted walking and looking over her shoulder. Behind her, there is an outdoor scene with the sky, tree, fences, and pavement. A hand is shown grabbing the phone and tapping the record button. On the left side of the phone, a small portion of the same sky, fences, and pavement is displayed in a different scale, representing the world outside the screen. On the right side of the phone, three figures of the same woman are shown against a plain blue background, progressively transforming from minimally glitched to heavily glitched.

Consent, Not Nudity, Should Define Image-Based Abuse Laws

Britain's Prime Minister Andy Burnham is shown the driver's area on a FirstGroup bus at the bus station during a visit to Bath, England, Wednesday July 22, 2026. (Toby Melville/Pool Photo via AP)

Burnham's First Week Redraws the Map of UK Tech Governance

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Brazil's Child Online Safety Law Offers a Different Path Than Social Media Bans

Why the Global AI Safety Agenda Cannot See African Harms

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Another Commission for Global AI Governance. How Can It Deliver for Africa?

A photo shows US Capitol in Washington, D.C., United States of America on July 2, 2026. (The Yomiuri Shimbun via AP Images)

Why Congress Must Codify a Chatbot Duty of Care

12 March 2026, North Rhine-Westphalia, Bergheim: Microsoft is building a data center region for AI applications in NRW. A total of three data centers are planned. The symbolic ground-breaking ceremony for the center in Bergheim was attended by Federal Minister of Digital Affairs Karsten Wildberger, NRW Minister of Economic Affairs Mona Neubaur, Head of Microsoft Germany Agnes Heftberger and Eoin Doherty (Microsoft). Photo by: Benjamin Westhoff/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Microsoft is building a data center region for AI applications in Bergheim, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Photo by: Benjamin Westhoff/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

The Case for a Temporary Moratorium on Large Data Centers in Europe

New York City is working to answer a critical question facing cities and states: How do we put people first in a modern, digital era to fundamentally change how government operates—and what can people expect from it?

What’s most notable is the way the city is answering this question: by giving a new dedicated digital delivery team the internal support, empowerment, and structural authority to prioritize people's needs over bureaucratic processes.

—nicknamed “the PIT Crew.” The PIT Crew is a new government team made up of product managers, designers, engineers, user researchers and data experts to team up with City agencies to build digital solutions to thorny public problems. One of the Crew’s first projects will be to partner with the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection to build an online service where New Yorkers can easily file complaints against companies that place customers in hard-to-cancel, costly subscriptions.

For New Yorkers, that work is the point of government. It's also a test of whether government can reset what people expect from public services both in New York and around the country.

talking to more than 100 government leaders

 who have delivered for people across local, state, and federal levels. We ourselves have built, led, and supported successful delivery teams around the country, including leading IRS’ Direct File. What we’ve learned is that when teams can organize around outcomes, not bureaucracy, they can truly move at the speed that government’s biggest challenges require.

New York City is looking to do this at scale. What can your city learn from the NYC PIT Crew—not just the team, but the theory of transformation? The answer lies in five principles that should become the standard operating procedure for digital capacity initiatives everywhere.

1. Set a standard that changes everything

Most government digital projects aim for incremental improvements, setting a goal of “better than last time.” That’s insufficient. The IRS Direct File showed what’s possible when you aim higher: services so intuitive, accessible, and reliable that residents come to expect government to just work.

Rather than settling for mere “improvement,” New York City—and other cities and states—should adopt aggressive user experience standards and measure success against private-sector benchmarks, not against other government agencies.

2. Organize around people’s needs, not org charts

Government is siloed by design. People don't experience government by agency. They experience it in moments: applying for a job, starting a business, navigating a health crisis. When a new parent needs childcare support, they don't care whether it's "Housing's job" or "Labor's job." They care that it works.

The most effective delivery teams organize themselves around people’s journeys. They break down silos in funding, staffing, and operations. Every state and city that wants to improve outcomes should ask: 

Are we organized to solve problems for residents, or for ourselves?

3. Empower teams to own outcomes end-to-end

Accountability in government is notoriously diffuse. This is where most initiatives die—not on launch day, but six months later, when the process starves what shipped. Successful digital capacity initiatives change that. A single team owns a service, is transparent about performance, and has the authority to make real changes. This requires giving teams:

Clear responsibility for measurable outcomes

Authority to hire, procure, and design without permission layers

Budget control to avoid the classic government trap of funding being held hostage by competing departments

Local governments serious about scaling impact should pilot this model in one high-impact service and measure results after 90 days.

This is where most digital initiatives fail: they build something beautiful and then get strangled by traditional government processes. Budget cycles, hiring freezes, and procurement bureaucracy can kill momentum faster than any technical failure.

The answer is straightforward in theory, hard in practice: apply agile, outcomes-driven approaches to 

—hiring, procurement, budgeting and policy approval. New York City's commitment to this approach through its 

Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE)

 is encouraging. Other governments should move faster in this direction.

5. Build openly and aim for replicability

When government solves a problem well, it should share the solution. Open-source code, reusable service components, documented playbooks—one city's solution becomes every city's starting point. One city shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel when another has already built it.

Governments should compete on outcomes, not on proprietary approaches. The team that figures out how to streamline unemployment benefits should publish that playbook. The agency that builds accessible design systems should share them.

The launch of the New York City PIT Crew is encouraging because it signals that leadership understands what’s needed: in-house talent, organizational authority, and political cover. That’s rare. Most governments talk about “innovation” while structurally making it impossible.

But the launch of a team isn't success—delivery is. And delivery at scale requires the principles above.

The opportunity in front of governors, mayors, and city administrators is clear: Don't wait to see if New York City's model works. Begin building your own version now, before a disaster strikes and you need your own PIT crew to clean it up. Organize a team around the highest-impact resident experience problem in your area. Give them authority. Measure relentlessly. Share what you learn.

People in other states and cities shouldn't have to wait for their government to deliver what New Yorkers will soon expect as standard. That gap—between what's possible and what's normal—is where innovation lives.

It's now up to other governments around the country to close it.

Telegram on App Store displayed on a phone screen and French flag displayed on a screen in the background are seen this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 3, 2023. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via AP)

A multilingual network of Telegram channels offering local news does not appear to be what it seems. It seems there is no newsroom behind any of it. Independent researchers working separately, including us at Democracy Reporting International, have reached the same conclusion about this cluster of growing Telegram channels: They belong to a coordinated operation spreading disinformation and propaganda aligned with the Kremlin that shares the same script, pushes biased and unverified content, translated and timed to hit everywhere at once.

Our research reveals how easily a network can significantly grow across many languages in a way that is difficult to detect, which is why we argue that European authorities should reconsider their light regulatory approach to Telegram.

During social media monitoring of the Hungarian elections earlier this year, DRI 

 seven of those previously uncovered channels, along with an additional twelve accounts that nobody had connected to this network. All 19 channels share the same signature of coordinated inauthentic behavior, and they never link or mention one another. Yet they all have similar names (translating roughly to "common sense"), and all but one share identical branding.

The "Common Sense network,” as we call it, shows two kinds of growth: vertical (rising subscriber counts within existing channels) and horizontal (new channels added over time). They tell different stories.

Subscriber numbers function as social proof. At its peak last winter, the network had over 220,000 subscribers; by early April it had dropped to 167,000, and it now sits under 100,000. We are confident the number will rise again, as it did last year, when each channel suddenly surpassed 10,000 subscribers almost overnight. The sudden spikes are consistent with purchased or otherwise inauthentic accounts. However, an unsuspecting German reader who does not spend time verifying a Telegram channel's legitimacy, and who encounters a channel "Die Stimme der Vernunft" which is posting regularly and has 40,000 subscribers, will likely conclude it is a serious channel. There is little to indicate that he or she has just walked into a network repeatedly linked to foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) operations.

Horizontal growth is a less ambiguous indicator. Nineteen channels across nineteen languages are themselves a significant footprint, and the more revealing insight is how the network came together. We reconstructed its horizontal expansion using data from the third-party service Telemetrio combined with systematic interval sampling of published messages via the Telegram API.

Step-line chart titled 'Network Growth Timeline (2022–2026): 19 channels across 19 languages,' showing the cumulative number of Telegram channels in the Common Sense network rising from 0 to 19 between November 2021 and May 2026. Growth occurs in discrete jumps: March 2022 adds 2 channels (PL, CS); June 2023 adds 1 (DE); August 2023 adds 6 (ES, HU, FR, IT, EL, NL); July 2024 adds 1 (EN); October 2024 adds 1 (SK); March 2025 adds 1 (RO); July 2025 adds 6 (SR, BG, HE, TR, FI, AR); and March 2026 adds 1 (SW). A shaded green region marks confirmed dates through mid-2025, and a shaded orange region marks partially estimated dates after August 2025. The largest single-day expansions—six new language channels each—occurred in August 2023 and July 2025.

Reconstruction of the Common Sense network's horizontal growth (N=19). The network may include additional channels that went undetected. Creation dates for confirmed channels are known exactly; for estimated channels, dates are approximated to a two-week window.

None of this growth, in either direction, is likely to be noticed by Telegram. A network that can double its subscriber count overnight, or add six new language audiences within days (as it did in August 2023 or July 2025) operates without triggering any visible intervention by the platform.

The obvious question is why such a network can continue expanding despite repeated public exposure.

The story with Telegram and EU regulation is also about numbers. Under the DSA, a platform becomes a Very-Large Online Platform (VLOP) if it has more than 45 million active monthly users. Telegram's 

 states they are still below that threshold. Its obligations are therefore largely limited to tackling illegal content: providing users with mechanisms to report it, acting on those reports, and protecting minors' privacy and safety. Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines (VLOPSEs) obligations, such as identifying and mitigating systemic risks, do not apply.

The “common sense network” relies on purchased bots, fake engagement, and automated or semi-automated activity to artificially amplify certain content and create the false impression of broader public interest than it actually has. While the content is not illegal, such inauthentic “news channels” undermine the integrity of the public debate. If Telegram were designated a VLOP, it would have to assess and mitigate systemic risks associated with coordinated manipulation.

Nothing, however, prevents Telegram from moderating this type of behavior voluntarily. 

, another non-VLOP, already prohibits harassment, spam, disruptive behavior, impersonation, and other forms of coordinated abuse under its community rules. Telegram has instead chosen a far more hands-off approach, at times even resisting l

Even where Telegram’s obligations are clear, its moderation record falls short of comparable platforms. On July 23, the 

 over the past 180 days. A higher volume of moderation doesn't necessarily mean better protection for users. It can also reflect more user reporting or over-removal. Even so, the gap with its closest counterpart is significant: WhatsApp Channels, comparable in design and user base, recorded 

 over the same period -roughly sixteen times as many.

Nor can this gap be attributed to a lack of content requiring moderation. Civil society organizations have recently documented illegal content on Telegram, including 

 (NCII), and child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Last year, the Belgian Institute for Postal Services and Telecommunications (BIPT) –the Digital Services Coordinator responsible for overseeing Telegram’s compliance with the DSA– separately identified hundreds of 

Taken together, these factors point to a gap: a platform with considerable reach and influence in the European Union is operating under a significantly lighter regulatory burden than its 

A path forward for stronger Telegram accountability

The most direct path is VLOP designation. Pressure is building on the European Commission to examine Telegram's status. In March 2025, a 

 the Commission to clarify the methodology behind Telegram's EU user count, pointing to independent research that suggests the real figure exceeds 45 million. The 

 was noncommittal: it said only that it was monitoring Telegram's figures, following market developments, and remaining in contact with relevant authorities.

Telegram's reported figures do raise legitimate questions. In February 2024, the company 

 average monthly active recipients in the EU. Since then, it has offered only the claim of "less than 45 million," even as its global user base has 

. That the EU figure has stayed just under the threshold throughout this period merits closer examination, particularly since WhatsApp Channels, Telegram's closest equivalent in design and use, crossed the threshold and was 

Part of the problem is methodological. Article 24(2) of the DSA gives the Commission the power to adopt a delegated act detailing the methodology of how "active recipients" should be counted, but it has not yet exercised that power, relying instead on 

. According to this guidance, an “active recipient” is anyone exposed to content disseminated through a platform's online interface. Public Telegram channels can be viewed, searched, indexed, and shared by anyone, whether or not they subscribe. If exposure to content is the relevant standard, as the DSA suggests, there are reasonable grounds to question whether Telegram's reported figures fully capture the reach of its public channels. Greater transparency about how the methodology should be to calculate those figures would help answer that question.

In the meantime, the European Commission and the Belgian regulator have tools available to strengthen Telegram’s accountability. The Belgian regulator could use its supervisory powers to examine Telegram’s compliance with its existing obligations on illegal content and child safety and open enforcement action where necessary. Research from civil society organizations and independent investigators is a crucial source of evidence to push for these efforts.

also shows that content identified on Telegram circulates across VLOPs, including Facebook, X, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. While our analysis does not prove coordinated cross-posting, it suggests that disinformation networks operate across multiple platforms. The DSA already provides a systemic risk framework that encourages stronger cooperation between VLOPs, VLOSEs, and platforms such as Telegram to identify and disrupt campaigns that move across services.

Commission's DSA Guidelines on mitigating systemic risks to electoral processes

 can serve as a useful benchmark for platforms such as Telegram. Although they cannot create new legal obligations for non-VLOPs, they can establish clearer expectations for addressing coordinated manipulation and other threats to electoral integrity.

Raffi Krikorian is Chief Technology Officer at Mozilla.

In Washington, AI is increasingly being treated as something that needs to be controlled. The government believes that AI is, first and foremost, a national security asset, meaning that it must be sequestered to prevent enemies from gaining an advantage. On the other side of the world, in Beijing, the approach is moving in the opposite direction. China is reducing barriers, encouraging adoption, and using open-source AI as a way to spread Chinese-developed technology across global markets.

There is now a fundamental divide. The United States is betting that control is the path to preserve its lead. China, instead, is betting on diffusion. The country whose technology is adopted most widely may ultimately shape the future of AI. Questions over open source and open weights sit at the center of that contest.

Beginning on July 24, high-profile support for open source moved what is often a debate behind closed doors into the public sphere, where it belongs: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang’s 

 signed by 35 companies — including Palantir, Andreessen Horowitz and Microsoft — warning Washington not to over-restrict open source software. “Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty,” Huang wrote, leading the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to post their support. 

Mozilla signed it because, despite being a very different company from many of the signatories and not always seeing eye to eye, we believe in the spirit and substance of the letter, particularly that 'openness may be one of the most important paths to AI safety and security’. The letter was followed by the 

 of the Open Secure AI Alliance for AI Safety and Security, which aims to “build and share open tools that promote responsible use of and trust in AI.”

The battle is on. Here’s what’s behind it.

Open models now do about a third of the world's AI work, but they collect only about four percent of the money.

Those two numbers, taken from Mozilla's new “

, provide more context than the entire AI safety conversation. The report tells a story of a performance gap between open models — the ones whose weights anyone can download, run, and adapt — and the best proprietary systems. While the capabilities are still a jagged frontier, on average, the performance has narrowed sharply over the past year. Costs keep falling. Seventy-nine percent of developers now build with open models. And yet the money hasn't followed the usage.

This is where the battle lies. A third of the work, but only four percent of the money — that gap is the prize.

The battle started almost exactly three years ago, when Anthropic's Dario Amodei 

 that advanced open-source AI is on a "very dangerous path." On the surface, his argument is pretty simple: once a model's weights are public, no one can monitor abuse or revoke access. Once released, an open weights model can't be “unreleased.” But let’s ask ourselves what that revoke switch actually does. Revocation is not a feature of the model, it is in the API contract. That means it only applies to a lab's own customers — and the people in Amodei's threat model were never customers. The labs shipping frontier-class open weights — such as DeepSeek, Alibaba, Mistral, and Moonshot (with its just-released, 2.8T-parameter model Kimi) — mostly sit outside Washington's reach anyway. Two million open models already sit on Hugging Face; many run on a laptop. That means that in the real world, there's no single kill switch to throw.

This distance between what such a regulatory switch claims to control and what it actually does is what's missing from the debate over which models are "safer." It's also the key to the fight over who captures AI's value.

To the companies that built the proprietary models, value is about maintaining a privileged position and using everything at their disposal to protect it — policy, pricing, and technology. For everybody else, value means the ability and power to shape, audit, and improve the systems we all depend on. And increasingly, that power doesn't live in the model at all.

For instance, right now, two developers can take the identical open model and ship completely different products: a scam-call operation or a nurse-advice hotline. The model doesn’t know (or care) about the difference. What is making the actual decisions is the layer of software built around it — the agentic harness — that sits between users and the model, determining what the application can access, remember, and act on.

As models get cheaper, not to mention more interchangeable, that harness is where the power is actually going. And it's being quietly locked up by the big labs. Farmers know how this story goes. They bought their tractors outright, but the manufacturer kept the keys to the software, making the farmers owners on paper but renters in practice. It took years of lawsuits — and, 

, the Federal Trade Commission — to start prying that lock back open. A similar arrangement is now being built for the software that reads your email, books your travel, and remembers every detail of your life.

This isn't an accident of engineering; it's a business model. A closed wrapper makes money by making itself expensive to leave. An open one can't lock the door, so it survives only by staying worth using. Same underlying technology, opposite incentives. It's the reason the value captured by open models sits at four percent while their usage sits at a third. The real question for all the builders right now isn’t which model you’re using. Rather, it's whether you could leave for a different one.

The debate that matters isn't really which models get released or which get regulated; it's who controls the layer wrapped around them. That's being decided right now — mostly by developers who don't realize they're the ones responsible. For a glimpse of the future, we can look to the internet: it exists as it does today because, when the architecture was still up for grabs, developers chose HTML and HTTP over proprietary walled gardens like AOL. AI is at that same juncture now, and the fact that two million open models already exist suggests plenty of builders have shown up early. That window doesn't stay open on its own, and it doesn’t stay open forever. It stays open because people keep choosing it.

For developers, four habits matter most in ensuring an open future:

Build on open harnesses, not just open models.

 The orchestration layer above the weights is where capability is concentrating, and closed labs are already welding it shut. Keeping it open takes deliberate effort.

Store accumulated context in portable controllable formats, so it's retrievable if a vendor changes its terms rather than trapped inside one.

 Integrate an open model and keep it production-ready even while running primarily on a closed API, so switching is cheap if it becomes necessary.

Open models skew toward particular regions and providers; keeping this layer genuinely open means actively supporting a geographically distributed set of options, not defaulting to whichever model is cheapest this quarter.

None of this requires believing anyone is acting in bad faith. It's worth noticing, though, that the loudest safety arguments arrived right around the time models got cheap enough for the real competition to move up a layer. That's not evidence of a conspiracy — it's just where the incentives point, and it's why so much of the current debate is aimed at the wrong target.

More evidence is in our report, and most of it is good news: performance gaps closing, costs collapsing, millions of developers building. The question in front of developers isn't whether AI is dangerous — it's whether they'll hold the keys to the machines they're building. The question for governments is whether the keys they’re reaching for turn anything at all. For now, that door is still open. Let’s work together to keep it that way.

European “digital sovereignty” and “digital autonomy” have become so fashionable that the terminology is being appropriated from all sides as the jumping off point for all sorts of claims and agendas. 

While fewer people had the first idea what “digital sovereignty” was only a couple of years ago (I first mentioned it and the concept of a “EuroStack” on 

 in August 2024), we are now in “sovereignty overload” as everyone drags their favorite topics into the discussion—digital regulation, access to frontier models, talking down Europe, “AI maximalism,” you name it. “The missing ingredient for digital sovereignty is X!” (where X is the writer’s pet passion); or “Digital sovereignty can never be achieved because of Y!” (where Y is the writer’s own special angle); or the best: “Digital sovereignty is delusional so we need to do deals with hyperscalers who will help Europe towards greater sovereignty!”

If we want the project of digital sovereignty to deliver for Europe and beyond, we need to stick to a narrow plan that produces real results, and not roll in all directions. Here’s a simple rendition of the plan from the perspective of the 

—which I regard as the main pragmatic voice for European digital sovereignty today, supported by nearly 500 companies across the tech stack:

The objective is to strengthen European digital assets and capabilities so that Europe is less of a “digital colony”. This does not mean protectionism, autarky, or exclusion of non-European vendors. There is no general adversarial sentiment towards US tech firms. There is no scenario in which they can all be supplanted. The aim is nonetheless to grow the share of European demand supplied by European solutions. The motivation is value capture and growth, not “democracy” and “European values.” Europe is currently in a position of grave dependency on non-European suppliers for multiple layers of its digital stack, and this undermines its ability to choose its own technology path, the direction of innovation, productivity growth, industrial strategy and ultimately geopolitical leverage.

Sovereignty should be concerned with the “full stack,” not just chips or cloud or hardware or software or connectivity or AI. We must care about growing European capabilities 

. This does not mean that the current configuration of the stack needs to be supplanted by an equivalent “European stack” built as an alternative monolith—this would be an unachievable plan, and the 

 suggestion this would require €300 billion was both an understatement and a measure of how much such a plan would be a non starter. We cannot be other than organic, opportunistic, incremental. No one has “a comprehensive plan” (least of all the European Commission). We will make it up as we go along, as economic incentives shape demand and funding. This is the nature of capitalism. Because while this should be an industrial strategy project, the reality is that Europe is too fragmented and scattered, and the EU’s authority and speed are too feeble and slow to make a difference. This must be a private initiative or bust. The geopolitical environment is favorable; funding is turning to European assets.

“Sovereignty” is not specifically “AI sovereignty.” If one means that, one should be explicit. But no sensible discussion of digital sovereignty or autonomy begins and ends with AI. AI is a use case: cloud + software + data. And as was well explained by Frederike Kaltheuner and Leevi Saari 

, AI that is built on hyperscaler cloud infrastructure (not just for model training, but also for inference, i.e. compute for model deployment) is not “sovereign.” We should be clear about limitations and magical thinking.

There is no clear, agreed roadmap because there is no single entity in control. So again, there cannot be a single plan. There will be different patches of initiatives at the national level as institutions have started doing their thing. The Commission’s June Sovereignty Package disappointed, but Member States are increasingly moving off US solutions independently. Enterprises and businesses are starting to come off the fence: Airbus has gone for Scaleway, the Dutch National Bank and multiple others for StackIt, and many more are experimenting and planning migrations. There is no central planning, and as there is no regulatory obligation to “buy European,” there needs to be a vision and a business case. But there is. And uncertainty around the adequacy of protections for European data transferred to the US (

 processing European data currently rely) after the 

SCOTUS ruling hangs as a further risk on European boards and motivates the search for alternatives.

There is growing interest from capital allocators. The European meme has forever been that the continent doesn’t have “innovation,” and that’s why we are where we are. Not so! Europe has tons of innovation—including research and startups—which it doesn’t scale because notoriously it sends billions of savings a year to US venture capitalists to invest in US tech, or in European startups after they migrate. This is changing: as European demand for European products increases, returns improve and capital allocators are turning to scaling up as a worthwhile endeavor.

This is what Europe should focus on, single mindedly and aggressively. Buy, fund, build. Do not punt to the Commission and the institutions all the time. That venture funds 

depend for a third of their funding on government entities

 reflects the reality that the European mindset remains utterly dependent and deferential to Brussels. But this need not be the way. It breeds a different type of dependency—from the bureaucracy. There is a vast lobby industry which makes up the Brussels Bubble and wastes energy in useless meetings and pursuits. Events. Roundtables. Summits. Dinners. This is all a distraction, which perpetuates Europe’s lack of actual agency.

Will it work? Maybe, with effort. Not as a top-down Commission plan, which will always be inadequate as it is not informed enough by business and capital, as well as underfunded. Private initiative needs to move and gain agency. European elites are complacent. Life is too sweet still in Europe. Citizens are much more alert and patriotic: but the elites are massively complacent. We will see.

As if all of this wasn’t difficult enough, a few narratives have sprouted around “digital sovereignty” lately that are either unhelpful, or at best a distraction:

1. A distraction: ‘The missing ingredient to digital sovereignty is enforcement of digital regulation’

This is the preserve of the regulation fans—those who invested massively in pushing and advocating for regulation like the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA), and cannot quite let go of this hope. The reality is that the regulation of the tech giants had failed to deliver anything worthwhile in Europe even before the Trump administration changed the context. But there is a hardcore set of experts for whom the task of developing and inspecting regulation is an 

, who fundraise on this basis for white papers and symposia and gatherings among themselves and regulators, and who cannot let go of the idea despite the lack of any clear achievements of European digital regulation other than very marginal ones. 

Did chasing Google Search give Europe a cloud? Ditto Android. Ditto Apple’s App Store, or Amazon e-commerce. I am all for powerful monopolies being reminded there is a limit to throwing their weight around and extracting (and I was involved in enforcement against Google directly in multiple jurisdictions). But alas experience has shown it does not majorly change their conduct, nor does it change market structure on the ground. European entrants fleetingly hoped they would benefit from the DMA, deluded by legions of advisors who stood to profit. But real results? They are difficult to discern.

The refusal of Europeans to face up to this as they still waste energy on the task of “regulate” instead of “build”—which is the most important thing we should have spent effort on for the last 15 years—is frustrating, because it funnels a lot of attention into this ultimately pointless effort.

Now the pivot. “Sovereignty” was nowhere in the minds of regulation fans when the regulation came about. It was good old fashioned utility-style regulation, with a couple of twists to accommodate network effects. Now that sovereignty is fashionable, regulation is being repurposed as “if we had proper enforcement of digital regulation, sovereignty would happen much faster because we could actually switch to alternatives!” This logic assumes there actually 

 alternatives, but they are not there because Europe forgot to build.

2. Wrong headed and dangerous: ‘Europe will never be a sovereign AI superpower’ or ‘Europe can never win the sovereign AI race’

It’s bad enough if uninformed Americans write this stuff. But Europeans writing this are truly puzzling. This was, for instance the title of a 

written by Europeans, but the same sentiment is widely shared among many who write with what appears to be a mixture of schadenfreude about the state Europe is in (as if it wasn’t a common

problem all over the world), plus a dose of knowing, savvy, and Silicon Valley cool aid thrown in.

First, what does the claim even mean? Who ever said Europe will be an “AI superpower,” or a sovereign one at that? Europe is an 

superpower, that much is true, and not a “middle power” as many would like it to resign itself to. And as such, it can mobilize resources—it is not poor. But it can do a lot with more agency and urgency. In AI, it is true Europe cannot currently create a frontier AI lab to match the capabilities of the top three US labs, and most of the value will be captured in compute and core intelligence. But there are multiple alternative architectures to the current LLM scaling laws, and Europeans can build something even if they are a few steps behind. For inference, smaller specialized models do not necessarily need to be stripped down versions of LLMs—more players are serving that segment, and there is a real opportunity.

3. Truly dystopian: ‘Europe needs to do deals with hyperscalers to enhance its future sovereignty’

Another version of the above narrative takes it to the next level and argues the answer is a wartime-speed buildout of compute on European soil, which includes cutting deals with US hyperscalers to site 

data centers in Europe (thus formally under European jurisdiction) in exchange for access to frontier LLM models that are ultimately at the whims of Washington (see 

). And what do hyperscalers get for it? The talk is to give them inducements

to build the compute needed to serve incoming European demand—permits, access to cheaper surplus 

, etc. This is horrifying and unnecessary. Europe knows how to build data centers—many Europeans can and do. The constraint isn’t funding—there is plenty of funding to build in Europe if there is demand. Without demand materializing, European builders take risks that US hyperscalers do not face, since they have already secured forests of GPUs and can always deploy capacity to serve their massive captive customer base in the US and abroad. But if there are data centers to be built in Europe, they should be built by Europeans

Not to do so is rolling back sovereignty further.

There is much to do for Europe. The answer is 

European enterprises and capital allocators taking the initiative without waiting for Godot—the institutions—forever. Stop the chattering and essay writing, and 

Europe has the talent, the money and the capability to rise. There is no “race” to be “won”—let’s do serious work and grow.

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