A viral doomsday scenario aims to shake Europe out of its AI complacency, raising questions about whether the thought experiment reflects genuine AI jitters or the reality of technological competition. The scenario, titled Europe 2031, envisions a future where the United States and China tear Europe into pieces due to the continent's failure to invest in artificial intelligence.
The Scenario Unfolds
By 2031, the US has ploughed vast sums into datacentres while the EU lagged behind. China built robots and Europe did not. American companies restructured their workflows around AI and fired people, while EU workers continued with long lunch breaks and handed administrative tasks to the AI model Claude. Now, Europe's economy is in shambles because it lacks its own AI. Populism surges, the euro wobbles, and cyber-attacks shred EU businesses. Brexit seemed like a good idea. It looks like the end of the European Union.
The speculative thought experiment, penned by Brussels-based thinktankers, was 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 went viral, feeding a feverish discussion of the urgency for EU tech sovereignty. It has been read by members of the European parliament and was brought up in track 1.5 discussions between British and German officials earlier this week.
Authors Feel Vindicated
The 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.
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 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 him, he says.
The Story from a Brussels Staffer
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 is 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 is too much scepticism, and most people think AI is a bubble.
Things go from there. The Americans spend huge sums on a massive AI building programme – the scenario highlights a real-life $100bn 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 is too late. The US deploys powerful frontier AI spyware and learns the deepest fears of EU officials and also which of them are having affairs. Curtains drop. Christian and Caroline exeunt stage left for a drink. Disaster impends.
Sceptical Readers Point Out Flaws
Sceptical readers might point out that a number of the eye-popping sums and big projects that the authors name-check in describing the US's AI ascent have already fallen apart. The $100bn agreement between OpenAI and Nvidia, the biggest AI deal of last year, evaporated in February. The $300bn between OpenAI and Oracle seems doubtful, especially as recent reports indicate the maker of ChatGPT is still billions of dollars underwater as it burns money on datacentre infrastructure. The bulldozers on the ground in Texas may not be bulldozing very much any more, as OpenAI pulled out of the flagship AI project to which that moment in the scenario seems to refer.
The authors are sanguine about these matters. Throughout the piece, they pre-empt potential objections – such as AI being overhyped – by suggesting that the hapless European officials have these worries, too, and they end up tragically wrong. I wouldn't rule out that there's some exuberance and that one or two AI companies might go bankrupt, says Negele. But what we wanted to get across is a general feel for a version of what we think will happen. He and his co-author, Alex Petropolous, agree that there could be some bumps in the road – including mounting resistance to datacentres in the US. People hate AI in general. A lot of people do. People hate datacentres. They destroy the landscape. They support big tech. It's a very, very unpopular policy, they note.
Solution: More Datacentres
The authors of Europe 2031 think that the solution to this is datacentres. Europe needs to build more, faster, ideally in AI zones where matters such as power and planning can be streamlined and deregulated. I think our view is that the total datacentre supply is quite an inelastic supply. So there will only be a limited number of datacentres built in the world every year, and the question is, how many of those do you want built in the US? How many of those do you want built in Europe? says Petropolous.
It is further worth noting that the main organisation behind the Europe 2031 scenario, Arq Foundation, based in Brussels, describes itself as neither an advocacy NGO nor a venture-backed startup and does not disclose who funds it. Brussels politicians who read it, though, may take away a simpler message: the scenario has crystallised a conversation about the need for Europe to have technological sovereignty.
Nicolás Casares, a member of the European parliament from Spain, says: This scenario, Europe 2031, I believe that some of the parts they mentioned can happen. But I think they are increasing – a bit – the alarms in order to call our attention. The US cutting off Europe's access to Fable, he says, means that the EU needs to ask itself harder questions about who is building its AI infrastructure and who will benefit from it. What is the added value of having OpenAI or Anthropic datacentres in Europe? he asks. We are buying a narrative that we need a lot of datacentres not to lose the race for AI. But this is crazy … we are paving the way for infrastructure that they will use and sometimes not allow us the possibility of using it.
