This is a really well written and argued case so it’s worth your time - but I strongly disagree. We live in a world of trade-offs, especially so if you are suggesting you use €100Bns of tax-payers money. So here are your options with what you can do with that capital to build sovereign technology capabilities: 1) Use it to lower the costs of the next wave of innovation for everyone ( cut energy costs, provide compute, cut innovation taxes, lower regulatory barriers etc ) 2) Use it to make many smaller bets to capture the next frontiers of innovation ( next gen chips, fusion, quantum, RSI etc ), lower the cost of capital ( back VC ) and underwrite the Government to take more risks purchasing domestic ( procurement reforms etc ). 3) Make one big bet that you can replicate the current SOTA in frontier models with a single Govt owned lab. It is ambitious and patriotic in a way to believe in 3, that the Government could co-ordinate the talent, resources and capital to do this. But history, and economics, suggest it is overwhelmingly a better idea to back entrepreneurs & researchers by making it easier for them to build bottom-up, not top-down through dictat. Recent American success has been mostly built on strategy 1) with some of 2). I’d argue recent Chinese industrial strategy has been mostly 2) supported by 1) ( but open to that debate! ). No-one has achieved 3) in an era where startups have clearly been a better organising approach for producing productivity surpluses. A fair counter is if you truly believe in the bitter lesson on compute, and that the current dominant technical architectures will be unsurpassable I.e this is the end state of technology before take off. This would be a very bold view indeed - and even then there are only ~ 10 people on the planet that could pull this off - and most are otherwise engaged. Back entrepreneurs. Support the innovators where the market fails. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

Broadly agree with you that 3 is ultimately not a good or feasible idea (I think Anton agrees, too!), but 1 and 2 are not really substitutes for it — they do not guarantee states access to frontier AI capabilities. Might pay off, but it's a risky bet. (My take is that UK and other countries should use things like advanced AI chips etc to try to build leverage to demand frontier access from the US.)

@ShakeelHashim @Jameswise Europe could do this now—impose export controls on ASML to all non-Europeans and then cut a deal with the US (guaranteed access to ASML’s tech for US chip supply chain in exchange for guaranteed frontier model access.) would not solve the problem long term but ok short term play.

@jeremyakahn @Jameswise Agreed! Dutch govt seems very reticent to use its leverage though (and the UK probably doesn’t get in on any deal like that…)