I am 27, French, and I am tired of living on a continent that treats AI, compute, chips, crypto, datacenters, energy and nuclear power as problems to manage instead of strategic assets to build.

I do not want frontier AI to become another nationality-gated privilege. I want powerful AI models to remain generally available to builders, researchers, engineers and founders. But what happened with Anthropic’s Fable/Mythos models proves that this cannot be taken for granted: once frontier AI becomes a national-security asset, access can be restricted by citizenship or nationality.

The problem is that Europe has failed to build its own equivalent. We are not in the frontier AI race at the level of the U.S. or China. We do not have the same hyperscale cloud stack, the same compute capacity, the same capital depth, the same energy strategy, the same chip ecosystem, or the same frontier-model ecosystem. And because AI progress compounds through compute, talent, chips, energy, data and capital, falling behind is not linear. Once the gap is deep enough, you do not catch up at the same pace.

Europe spent decades regulating, moralizing, delaying and underbuilding the foundations of technological power. Cloud was missed. Crypto was treated primarily as a criminal-risk category before Europe built anything globally dominant in it. Datacenters are slowed by permitting, grid and energy constraints. Nuclear power was politically weakened or delayed across much of the continent just when abundant electricity became essential. AI is now being regulated before Europe has even produced a true top-tier frontier lab/model (no, MistralAI isn't a real competitor, for me, even Kyutai did more innovation/progress in the AI space than MistralAI).

Our leaders now talk about "sovereign AI", "AI factories", "gigafactories", and "strategic autonomy", but this language came far too late. You cannot regulate your way into technological sovereignty. You cannot paperwork your way into compute. You cannot build frontier AI without massive power, massive datacenters, massive capital, elite talent, advanced chips and a political culture that actually wants builders to move fast.

Europe still has talent. France still has engineers, mathematicians, scientists and founders. But the system around them is broken. The incentives are wrong. The mindset is wrong. Every mainstream political camp in France and Europe seems to have the same reflex: regulate first, tax first, restrict first, moralize first, build later.

ASML is the exception that proves the rule. It is one of the only truly strategic European chokepoints in the global compute stack. But one Dutch lithography champion cannot carry an entire continent that failed to build the rest of the stack: frontier AI labs, hyperscale cloud, Nvidia-class accelerators, TSMC-class fabs, massive datacenter capacity, cheap abundant energy and deep capital markets.

I did not vote for 20+ years of anti-growth, anti-compute, anti-nuclear, anti-crypto and anti-industrial policy. I was a kid. But my generation is supposed to live with the consequences: less access, less sovereignty, less capital, less compute, less ambition and a future where the most important technologies are built and can only be used somewhere else.

That is the part I cannot accept.

I do not want to spend my adult life asking permission to use technologies my continent was too slow, too afraid or too complacent to build.

I do not want European builders to become tenants in someone else’s technological empire (as it's already the case).

And I do not want "sovereignty" to mean nothing more than regulating foreign systems after failing to create our own like they're doing right now with cloud computing.

Either Europe becomes a builder civilization again, or the next generation of Europeans will inherit a beautifully regulated dependency that slow or even stop us.

For now, Europe still talks like history will wait...