TechBBQ in Copenhagen wrapped up August 27, and the conversation that followed attendees from panel stages to rooftop bars wasn’t about flashy new capabilities. It was about control. The catalyst: Anthropic’s AI models Mythos and Fable became unavailable to users outside Europe earlier this year, forcing European founders and investors to confront a dependency they’d mostly been willing to ignore.
Reactions to the Anthropic incident split two ways. One startup executive told me the disruption seriously hurt his software team. Another shrugged it off, admitting that relying on U.S. and Chinese AI might eventually cause severe headaches, but for now things still work fine. That divide captures the tension running through the Nordic tech scene: knowing the risk exists but not yet feeling enough pain to act on it.
Ellen de Brever, an angel investor and head of partnerships at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Cellerator, framed the shift bluntly: ‘The debates weren’t about smarter machines, but about human judgment and who gets to stay in the driver’s seat.’ Signal president Meredith Whittaker went further, calling this AI era a ‘data collection apparatus’ and criticizing AI assistants being baked into operating systems — pointing directly at ChatGPT’s integration with iMessage. She argued the marketing around AI makes people forget ‘the collateral consequences’ of mass data acquisition.
Emad Mostaque, co-founder of Stability AI, delivered the starkest warning: ‘The person that controls the AI controls the country.’ His claim that every country will inevitably be run by AI echoes concerns that have circulated since OpenAI’s ChatGPT reset the competitive landscape in late 2022, but hearing it at a European conference from someone who built a major open-source AI company gave it weight. The question hanging over TechBBQ wasn’t whether Europe can build sovereign AI infrastructure — it’s whether European startups will demand it before the next Anthropic-style disruption hits.
