Europe's Founders Demand AI Sovereignty at TechBBQ — SkimNews
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- TechBBQ in Copenhagen, which wrapped August 27 under the theme "Emerging from Agency," saw AI sovereignty dominate panels, cocktail hours, and after-parties after Anthropic's Mythos and Fable models became unavailable to users outside Europe earlier this year.
- Signal President Meredith Whittaker spoke against AI assistants being integrated into operating systems — singling out ChatGPT's iMessage integration — and called the current era a "data collection apparatus" built on clever marketing that obscures "collateral consequences."
- Emad Mostaque, co-founder of Stability AI and Intelligent Internet, defined sovereignty as "the ability to resist power being exerted over you" and warned that "the person that controls the AI controls the country," pointing to concentration of power in a few AI labs.
- Ellen de Brever, angel investor and head of partnerships at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Cellerator, said the conference's debates shifted from "what AI can do to what we're actually willing to let it do," framing the age of AI agents as "a story about humans deciding what to give up."
- Mia Negru, advocacy and engagement director at the nonprofit Life With Artificials, argued that intelligent agents performing cognitive work and robots performing physical work may force a rethinking of ownership, work, democracy, and "who gets to participate in society."
- One startup exec told the author the Mythos and Fable lockout "seriously disrupted" his software team, while another shrugged it off — illustrating the split in the European ecosystem over how urgent AI independence actually is.
- The conference's lighter side featured a rooftop barbecue hosted by Nvidia, OpenAI, AWS Startups, HSBC, and Lovable, an Ada Ventures cocktail at Bird, and a speakers' dinner on a Copenhagen island with fire dancers.
Why it matters: European founders are now actively weighing whether to own AI models and infrastructure rather than rent from U.S. and Chinese labs, after Anthropic's sudden withdrawal of Mythos and Fable from Europe earlier this year showed the concrete cost of that dependency — one startup exec told the author his software team was "seriously disrupted," while others shrugged it off.
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