At TechBBQ, Europe's AI conversations kept returning to who's in control

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At the annual Nordic TechBBQ conference in Copenhagen, which wrapped up August 27th, conversations among European investors, founders and operators kept circling back to a single pointed question, who actually controls the AI technology that European businesses increasingly depend on. This year's conference theme, Emerging from Agency, became less about what AI can technically do and more about what humans are actually willing to let it do, according to Ellen de Brever, an angel investor and head of partnerships at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Cellerator

The urgency behind this specific conversation was sharpened by a real incident earlier this year when Anthropic made its Mythos and Fable models temporarily unavailable to users outside the US, catching some European startups off guard mid workflow. One executive told TechCrunch the disruption seriously affected his team's actual workflow, while another shrugged it off as a manageable inconvenience for now, even while acknowledging relying on foreign geopolitical powers for core AI infrastructure could eventually cause serious problems. Signal President Meredith Whittaker also spoke on a panel specifically about whether privacy and AI can genuinely coexist

As de Brever put it, the age of AI agents isn't really a story about machines gaining agency, it's a story about humans deciding what to actually give up. Curious what people think Europe can realistically do to gain more genuine control over AI infrastructure it doesn't currently own or directly build itself

At TechBBQ, Europe's AI conversations kept coming back to: Who's actually in control? | TechCrunchtechcrunch.com