The New York Times Debate: Europe does not have what it takes for AI sovereignty (Curated by DEBATABLE)

Two teams of debaters. Considered jury members. One provocative motion. A lively exchange of ideas designed to challenge assumptions, surface competing perspectives and deepen understanding. The audience decides. AI is reshaping the foundations of national power: economic competitiveness, defence, critical infrastructure, energy and the health of democracies themselves. AI sovereignty is the ability of a country or region to develop, control and govern AI without depending on foreign powers. It spans the full stack: the chips and computing power that train models, the models themselves, the talent and capital that build them, and the data, energy and rules that govern their use. The United States leads on capital, scale and frontier models. China is building vast domestic capability and dominates the critical minerals that hardware depends on. Europe sits between them. It holds some strengths, including advanced chipmaking equipment, strong research and a distinctive, rights-based approach to AI regulation, yet it trails on investment, commercial scale and homegrown compute. Can Europe close this gap, or has it now grown too wide for European AI sovereignty? Beneath this sits a harder question: is matching the United States and China even the right goal, or should Europe's task be to support a broader international ambition of building AI that is both capable of powerful outcomes but within the context of better governance? And crucially, could open-source AI offer Europe a credible path to compete without requiring the same capital and scale as its rivals?