The very bold, borderline silly, but maybe enlightened move would consists in banning OpenAI and Anthropic on EU soil.
I hate the idea of a EU AI firewall. Because I hate the idea of a firewall.
But.
The important thing to understand is that creating a great model is 1- pre-training (mostly commoditized), 2- mid-training which is about making useful representations emerge about the tasks we care about. Done mostly with masked training on user trajectories. Aka usage data. And 3- post training which consists in aggregating and leveraging useful RL environments, which is capital intensive but « buyable ».
The mid training part can’t be bought.
The US have the usage from all over the world, and China has usage from its country driven to its labs thanks to their firewall.
What is left to EU?
Peanuts.
In a world where the US can shutdown models on us we need to fix this. Which means driving usage to EU labs so that we can train frontier models. I hate it but the most efficient lever seems to be banning US labs.
I would hate to not have access to Claude code. But I would love to share my struggle with labs that operate on my national or supernational soil. Especially if this (and I think it does) means catching up the frontier within a year.
Are there efficient alternatives? How bad would it get if we would pull the trigger? For how long?
Time for France and Europe to wake up.
Every doomer tv show, blog post or prediction piece of the last 5 years starts with something that looks like this event.
Right now we need a de Gaulle moment, politics bold enough to ensure at any cost that we have the means to control our future.
