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

At the TechBBQ conference held in Copenhagen, European investors, founders, and operators focused their discussions on who should control artificial intelligence. This theme aligns with the theme of this year’s “Emerging from Agency” conference, where Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models were previously restricted from use outside Europe, prompting industry discussions about model ownership and infrastructure control. Participants discussed shifting from AI capabilities to human will and judgment, emphasizing that sovereignty means the ability to resist power. Signal chairperson Meredith Whittaker opposed integrating AI assistants into operating systems, arguing that they constitute data collection devices; Stability AI co-founder Emad Mostaque pointed out that power is concentrated in a few laboratories, and predicted that countries will eventually be run by AI.