Rahim Jina

Hello from Dublin airport as I'm leaving the International AI Summit with something close to existential dread from being exposed yet again to the parallel reality in which much of Europe’s political establishment appears to be living. The summit was literally organized around the theme of European competitiveness. Yet from the plenary stage, I heard from mostly American companies (fair play to them, Ireland is home to their international HQs) coupled with European politicians advancing claims that the AI Act, DFA, CADA and other digital rules somehow make European startups more competitive and that regulation is what will stop AI agents from “escaping their sandboxes." Meanwhile, you could walk around the innovation hall and struggle to find any of the major European AI companies that are actually trying to compete at the frontier. Panel after panel returned to the same comfortable and boring platitudes about trust, values, guardrails and responsible innovation. There is an huge disconnect from the real world. In a desperate pursuit of sovereignty for sovereignty's sake and an ever-growing digital maze of bureaucracy, Europe will fall behind in AI. We will have fewer frontier companies, less capital, less compute and dramatically less appetite for risk than the US or China. We will also be incapable of grasping (or, at a minimum, understanding) the opportunities ahead of us. Instead, we keep congratulating ourselves on having built a telegraph cable in the 1800s (!?) and now the world's most elaborate regulatory framework and call that a competitive advantage. One of the few genuinely refreshing interventions came from Siemens CTO and Chief Strategy Officer Dr. Peter Koerte, who spoke frankly about some of the real obstacles European innovators face. I will keep saying this until I'm blue in the face: Europe does not have an AI values problem, it has an AI competitiveness problem. But I’m increasingly worried that many of the people supposed to solve either don't have the intellectual capacity or curiosity to do so. To end on a positive note: the event was super slick, and the logistics were very straightforward. Congrats to the Irish government for their ability to put together a great experience for their guests, for being so welcoming, and attracting a very high caliber of speakers. #AISummitIE #Ireland2026EU