The Brussels Effect in AI: European Irrelevance

Last month, I had the honor of speaking at the Tocqueville Conversations in Normandy. Every year, the Fondation de Tocqueville invites global leaders, scholars, policymakers, business executives, and others to gather at the Château de Tocqueville to discuss and debate the future of democracy, drawing on the ideas of Alexis de Tocqueville.

I was on a panel discussing AI and the future of democracy, moderated by Bérénice Levet, a French philosopher and essayist.

My fellow panelists approached AI primarily through philosophical, political, and ethical lenses. A recurring theme was how to preserve what makes us human in an age of increasingly capable AI. There was some discussion of French philosophers. None of whom I’ve ever read.

But I’m focused on a more immediate reality: AI has already become a strategic technology. It’s a weapon, a tool of persuasion, an economic lever, and a key piece of infrastructure.

The development of frontier AI is unfolding as an arms race between the United States and China, comparable to the naval steel competition before World War I. Even some of the terminology is the same. We talked about foundries for making silicon; we had foundries for making steel. Many of the dynamics are similar.

Frontier AI infrastructure has become so capital-intensive and fast-moving that only a handful of countries can compete at the leading edge. Europe should concentrate on developing world-class capabilities higher in the AI stack, where specialization and collaboration offer a more realistic path to competitiveness than building rival infrastructure.

In the AI development race so far, Europe has focused more on regulating the technology than on finding a space in which it can build world-class capabilities. And by doing so, it has sentenced itself to irrelevance.

The Brussels effect is only real for things that don’t matter very much - and this is something that’s existential. I said some things that I don’t think the other panelists wanted to hear. The transatlantic divide, as one attendee said, was very much on display.

Here is a link to the entire panel, entitled “Solitude of the Democratic Individual in the Age of the Internet and AI.”

My fellow panelists were: Baptiste Detombe, Parliamentary Official; Riccardo Pozzo, a professor at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences; and Edouard Tetreau, Executive Adviser and Columnist at Le Figaro.