As the US and China surge ahead, is Europe sleepwalking into AI disaster?

AI apps on a smartphone: many experts think Europe is lagging behind the US and China, and the continent needs to wake up to the implications. Photograph: Hannibal Hanschke/EPAView image in fullscreenAI apps on a smartphone: many experts think Europe is lagging behind the US and China, and the continent needs to wake up to the implications. Photograph: Hannibal Hanschke/EPAAs the US and China surge ahead, is Europe sleepwalking into AI disaster?

A burgeoning genre of fictional AI doomsday scenarios says lagging behind on the technology could threaten the continent’s sovereigntyIt’s 2031 and the US and China are about to tear Europe into pieces.The US ploughed vast sums into datacentres and the EU did not. China built robots and Europe did not.

American companies “restructured” their workflows around AI and fired people, while EU workers went on long lunch breaks and handed over administrative tasks to the AI model Claude.Now the chickens are coming home to roost. Europe’s economy is a shambles because it does not have its own AI.

Populism is surging, the euro is wobbling, cyber-attacks are shredding EU businesses. Brexit seemed like a good idea. It looks like the end of the European Union.

That, at least, is the vision of a speculative thought experiment, called Europe 2031, penned by Brussels-based thinktankers and published fortuitously one day before the Trump administration decided to block “foreign nationals” from using a much-hyped AI model built by Anthropic, called Fable.In the heady week of G7 talks that followed, the scenario has gone viral – feeding a feverish discussion of the urgency for EU tech sovereignty. It has been read by members of the European parliament and, say its authors, was brought up in track 1.

5 discussions between British and German officials earlier this week.View image in fullscreenThe Trump administration has blocked ‘foreign nationals’ from using Anthropic’s Claude Fable AI model. Photograph: Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto/ShutterstockIts authors say they feel “vindicated”, by the attention it has received and by the fact that one of their predictions – that the US would restrict global access to advanced AI models – appears to have briefly come true.

They hope the scenario will spur Europe towards a dramatic course-correction on AI.The piece is part of a burgeoning genre of fictional AI doomsday scenarios, created by obscure figures, which have gained surprising traction among policymakers over the past year. In 2025 there was AI 2027, a thought experiment which culminates in a superintelligent AI killing all of humanity to make way for more datacentres; in February, another speculative scenario imagined AI upending the US economy.

(The first was read by US vice-president JD Vance, the second contributed to a stock market wobble.)One complication of all this might be that their thought experiment is at times based on current developments in AI whose outcome is uncertain or in doubt.Maximilian Negele contributed to Europe 2031, he says, because of the “incredible translation barrier” between Brussels and San Francisco, where AI is being developed.

Formerly at US thinktank Rand, he left his job this year to focus on the project.“As somebody who travels to San Francisco quite a bit and talks to people there, what is happening in Europe just seemed like a slow-moving car crash to me,” he says.The scenario unfolds from the perspective of a fictional bright-eyed Brussels staffer, Caroline Dubois, who has a German friend, Christian Vogt, with a startup in San Francisco.

On a visit, she’s impressed by America’s “70 or 80-hour” working weeks and discomfited by the conviction among tech bros that everything is about to change.Back in Europe, she works to evangelise her well-meaning bosses about the impending AI future – but fails to convince. There’s too much scepticism, and most people think AI is a bubble.

View image in fullscreenThe $100bn deal between OpenAI and Nvidia, the biggest AI deal of 2025, collapsed in February. Photograph: Dado Ruvić/ReutersThings go from there. The Americans spend huge sums on a massive AI building programme – the scenario highlights a real-life $100bn (£75bn) deal between OpenAI and Nvidia, the $300bn agreement between OpenAI and Oracle, and “bulldozers” breaking earth in Texas for an AI datacentre.

Europeans, meanwhile, put forward a tepid investment package and ignore advisers’ pleas for “a full regulatory carte blanche for datacentre providers”.In a matter of years, America monopolises 70% of the world’s “compute” – the semiconductor chips that fill the datacentres that power AI models. Europe’s economy is meanwhile gasping for air, mostly because its companies have not adopted AI.

As AI-powered cyber-attacks shred European firms and unemployment surges, EU officials scramble to parlay their one last bargaining chip – the Dutch lithography firm ASML, which is vital to the production of AI semiconductors – into concessions from Beijing or Washington. But it’s