American Tech Giants No Longer Have a Home in the EU

... and will increasingly be pushed out of the EU market due to regulation and political resistance.

A key theme on Futuristic Lawyer is trying to understand American technology through the lens of European laws and values. I believe that the ideological battle between American technocrats and European bureaucrats will define how humans relate to technology in the 21^st century and beyond.

While the US has the most advanced tech in the world and very little regulation, the EU has the strongest machinery for regulating tech in the world, but very little innovation. For several years, the jokes have been on the EU for its archaic museums and strict regulation of plastic bottle caps. Now, a political land shift is taking place in the US enabled by market mechanics and the dominance of tech platforms. And it’s no joking matter.

For decades, the US held up a guiding light to the rest of the world by showing what the human imagination was capable of when pursued by technical minds and hands and a strong central governing force. As countries outside of the US have now witnessed, the radical openness to bold, new ideas and the innocent naivety that underlies tech-optimism comes at the risk of misplaced trust in leaders with bad intentions. Unelected billionaires and tech platforms now play an outsized role in US politics. Their power has been solidified by Trump’s second election victory, marking the first time in US history when trees with open minds and hearts voted for the ax.[1] Consequently, in a sharp turn away from the country’s proud tradition of diplomatic and intelligent leadership, the US is now prioritizing the wealth and personal agendas of very rich individuals over the well-being of public society.

Senseless tariffs, masked federal agents roaming the streets and kidnapping people with brown skin at random, federal funding cuts to public institutions that exercise their First Amendment right to free speech, and reversed Robin Hood efforts to take money from average and poor Americans and give them to billionaires during a time of rising debt and inflation, is the new normal. Simultaneously, billions of dollars are spent to rapidly construct and expand datacenters in order to meet the outrageous energy demands of AI models that are cynically trained on the world’s corpus of intellectual property. Seemingly, a large portion of Americans turn the other cheek to these developments, and continue to clap rhythmically for the third year in a row to the steady stream of new AI product releases. As Ruchir Sharma pointed out in a Financial Times article, AI investments account for a 40% share of US GDP growth this year at minimum and AI companies have accounted for 80% of gains in US stocks so far in 2025.

The driving narrative pushed by the tech-elite is that AI products will soon lead to something called “superintelligence”. This is a new entity that the tech billionaires in Silicon Valley are building in secret and it will solve all of the country’s problems, just wait. Unless, erhm, the superintelligence goes rogue and destroys humanity. But that is a risk worth taking, argues the foreseeing tech billionaires while investing in doomsday bunkers and remote private islands.

The arguments against superintelligence are truly hard to refute. Just listen to Sam Altman answering a long and well-articulated argument by the brilliant scientist David Deutsch about why LLMs are not a sustainable path towards AGI:

“Sam Altman: If in a few years GPT-8, figured out quantum gravity and could tell you its story about how it did it and the problem it was thinking about and why it decided to work on that. But it still just looks like a language model output, but it really did solve it. Would that be enough to convince you?

David Deutsch: I think it would, yes.

Sam Altman: Alright, I will agree to that as a test.

Host: Thank you, David Deutsch.

[End of show, audience applause]”

That is a classic example of a modern expert debate about AI. Here, Sam Altman clearly came out as the crowd’s favorite. No wonder. In the age of social media, the ground truth is often established around whatever feels most gratifying to the dopamine-reward centers of the brain. Why should Americans listen to negative talk about fascism when they can think positively and focus on the grand promises and fantastical visions of tech leaders and Trump?

The EU might be decades, if not centuries behind the US in terms of tech innovation. However, the EU’s democratic core remains intact. Likely because Europeans in general are more skeptical and closed-minded compared to Americans. The shield of cynicism protects their democracies from the undue influence of unelected billionaires who have too many good ideas about how society should be governed. Further, freely believing in the most stimulating accounts of the past, present and future erodes the common ground truth that is the basis for democratic conversations. Simply, when people are no longer able to agree on data and facts, there can be no democracy and social media discussions fully disintegrate from the political reality. Right now, few guardrails are holding the American tech elite back from shaping new technologies in their image and to their advantage, while burning taxpayer money on environmentally taxing data centers that come without benefits to locally affected communities.

The fact that new products such as Apple Intelligence, Sora 2, Waymo’s self-driving cars and the translation feature in Meta’s Ray Ban glasses are delayed or may never be launched in Europe is a trivial price to pay for continued democracy – in my humble opinion. The EU has no choice, but to distance itself from foreign, money-hungry and data-thirsty tech billionaires during their manic episodes, because they don’t share the EU’s fundamental values of democracy, due process and human rights. As a result, the American BigTech companies will increasingly find that their products and arguments don’t have a home in the EU.

I provide six concrete examples below from recent months.