Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the author of the award-winning “Goodbye Globalization” and a regular columnist for POLITICO. Her new book, Undersea War, is out later this year. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a thoughtful and stirring speech at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, speaking of “a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints.” Though he didn’t mention the U.S. by name, it was clear Washington’s recent behavior had driven him to this conclusion. The speech didn’t please U.S. President Donald Trump, who went on to call Carney ungrateful and threatened to impose 100-percent tariffs on Canada if it struck a trade deal with China — even though Washington itself has been conducting a series of trade talks with Beijing. Trump appears willing to harm America’s allies in ways that once seemed inconceivable, and threats — as we’ve learned — are his way, with many of them are directed at allies. The threat against Canada, for example, came just days after Trump reminded luminaries at the World Economic Forum in Davos that he was very serious about annexing Greenland. And that was after he’d threatened new U.S. tariffs against European nations voicing support for Denmark. Tariffs for European friends are, of course, already a reality. In late January, the U.S. president told an interviewer he imposed 39 percent tariffs on Switzerland after its president “rubbed me the wrong way.” All of this is why we need to start looking somewhere we haven’t had to before: at the bottom of the ocean, at undersea cables — more specifically, at the U.S. firms owning undersea cables. Google & Co. aren’t just tech giants, they’re now cable giants too. And if the White House were to instruct them to disconnect the nations it wanted to hurt, those countries would find themselves in very serious trouble. The speech didn’t please U.S. President Donald Trump, who went on to call Mark Carney ungrateful and threatened to impose 100-percent tariffs on Canada if it struck a trade deal with China. | Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images Back in the 1850s, when undersea telegraph cables were first invented, they were owned by a small number of pioneering private companies. Because the prospect of international telegraph traffic was enormously appealing, a couple of them managed to attract government backing for their more audacious undertakings. Later on, as cable traffic developed and grew, it mostly became the domain of state-owned postal services, since they were also in charge of telegraph services. And when undersea telephone cables arrived in the mid-20th century, they were mostly helmed by government-owned telephone companies. Nowadays, we have several hundred data cables on the seabed because that’s how the Internet travels. For decades, telephone companies around the world teamed up to buy and operate them. More recently, however, tech companies, television providers and a whole host of other companies solely in the business of owning and operating subsea cables have also joined in. Since undersea cables are expensive and — for the most part — connect two or more countries, such international consortia make sense. Unsurprisingly, some of these consortium participants are American. But these days, some of the most powerful cables being installed have only one kind of owner: a U.S. tech giant. Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft already co-own numerous subsea cables with other firms, but now they’re striking out on their own: Google, the leader of the pack, already operates a cable connecting South Carolina with Bermuda and Portugal, and it’s about to add more, including the only cable connecting Florida and Europe. Amazon will be the sole owner of a new cable connecting Ireland and the U.S., and Meta is working on Waterworth — a massive 50,000-kilometer cable circling the globe. These wealthy firms indisputably have the money, and their assumption that AI will further accelerate data use is also beyond argument. The tricky part is the state of the world. Back in the 1850s, when undersea telegraph cables were first invented, they were owned by a small number of pioneering private companies. | The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images Subsea cables functioned swimmingly during the harmonious post-Cold War years because nations were eager to get along and increase prosperity. In the past three years, however, we’ve received regular and dramatic reminders that people, perhaps at the behest of a hostile state, can damage these cables. That’s why we need to worry about the prospect of a new geopolitical risk on the seabed — the risk that a country may decide to harm other nations by exploiting the cables’ ownership. China and the U.S. already lean on their cable owners not to connect any upcoming cables with the respective other country. And while many Western nations have grown wary of close ties with China, Trump’s recent conduct suggests they should be concerned about data-cable dependence on the U.S. as well. U.S. cable owners are in the business of business, not geopolitics. But if the U.S. president, perhaps enraged by the comments of a European leader, were to tell tech giants to block the continent from the cables they own or co-own, would they really defy his instructions? Based on their behavior leading up to Trump’s second inauguration — where the CEOs of Amazon, Meta and Google stood behind him at the ceremony — it’s safe to say the answer is a likely “no.” European banks and officials are already thinking along such lines when it comes to the dominance of U.S. payment cards like Visa. They have, according to the Financial Times, “become increasingly concerned that US payment companies’ power could be weaponised in the event of a serious breakdown in relations.” Indeed, on Feb. 19,  Britain’s banking bosses will meet to discuss a U.K. alternative. It would be privately owned and backed by the government, the Guardian reports. On the seabed, we also need to prepare accordingly. That includes helping European companies form alliances that can compete with the Silicon Valley hegemons-in-waiting.

NEW DELHI — A top United States official on Wednesday told the European Union to focus more on innovation in artificial intelligence — and less on rules. “I do think the atmosphere in the EU needs to change and be more focused on innovation, less focused on governance and less focused on doomerism,” said Sriram Krishnan, the White House’s senior policy adviser on artificial intelligence, at an event of the Tony Blair Institute on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit. Krishnan reiterated the U.S. opposition to the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act, which was adopted in 2024 and aims to mitigate risks associated with the technology. “The EU AI Act, which I have ranted about before this job, during this job, maybe after this job … it’s not really conducive to an entrepreneur who wants to build basic technology,” he said. One example, Krishnan said, was Peter Steinberger, the Austrian coder behind the personal AI assistant platform OpenClaw who is moving to the U.S. to join OpenAI. Krishnan was much more positive about India’s regulatory approach, which he praised as “pro-innovation.” World leaders, including EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen and French President Emmanuel Macron, will gather on Thursday in New Delhi. A draft of the declaration of the summit, seen by POLITICO, didn’t include the word safety. Ever since the first AI Summit in the United Kingdom in 2023, the series of annual summits has gradually shifted from discussions on AI governance to business and investment deals between the industry and governments.

Call it “bots on the ground.” One in three Germans think their country should allow artificial intelligence to make life-or-death decisions on the battle field, according to The POLITICO Poll. A third of respondents in Germany said they favor AI systems to be used in weapons in place of human decision makers, even if these systems are less transparent, the poll showed. The results suggest a cultural shift, as the government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz no longer explicitly excludes lethal decisions without human checks. It also puts Germany in a different category than some of its allies: In the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and France, 26 percent of respondents said militaries could rely on AI rather than human decision — or roughly a quarter of people. Forty-seven percent of German respondents still favored human involvement in the use of weapons, even if they are slower than AI. But that figure was 10 percentage points lower than responses to the same question in the U.K., eight points lower than in the U.S. and Canada, and five percentage points lower than in France.  Almost half of respondents in Germany (46 percent) said cybersecurity and artificial intelligence capabilities mattered as much as traditional military power to win wars. The online survey, conducted for POLITICO by the independent London-based polling company Public First, comes as political leaders, security chiefs and industry officials gather in Germany for the Munich Security Conference. Part of their discussions get into how technologies like AI are changing the nature of warfare and national security strategies. The relatively high acceptance of so-called lethal autonomous weapons systems — also known as “killer robots” — is surprising when considering Berlin’s slow uptake of new technologies and its deep cultural attachment to data protection, which is being put under pressure by new AI applications. Germany has also had a fiery public debate over killer robots in past years. In 2021, a survey commissioned by an NGO coalition campaigning against killer robots said only 19 percent of respondents approved of such autonomous weapon systems, and 68 percent expressed ethical concerns about lethal decisions made without human control. Three years earlier, in 2018, 72 percent of respondents were against autonomous weapon systems. Berlin’s governing coalition, which took office last year, no longer explicitly excluded lethal decisions without human control in its coalition agreement — unlike the center-to-left coalition government that preceded it. AI-enabled weapons have changed the war in Ukraine, where drones have become a chief vector for armies to hit critical military and strategic targets, often operating independently.  Germany is preparing to spend €267.7 million on a new drone system from defense startup Helsing, but field data from deployments in Ukraine showed its drones have performed far below expectations, POLITICO reported last month. United Nations Secretary General António Guterres has long opposed these weapons, calling them “politically unacceptable and morally repugnant.” But years of discussions between governments at the U.N. have so far not yield clear rules on their use. The EU has its AI Act in place since 2024 to deal with the risks stemming from AI, but those rules don’t apply to military applications, which are a sovereign competence of member countries. This edition of The POLITICO Poll was conducted by Public First from Feb. 6 to 9, surveying 10,289 adults online, with at least 2,000 respondents each from the U.S., Canada, U.K., France and Germany. Results for each country were weighted to be representative on dimensions including age, gender and geography. The overall margin of sampling error is ±2 percentage points for each country. Smaller subgroups have higher margins of error. The survey is an ongoing project from POLITICO and Public First, an independent polling company headquartered in London, to measure public opinion across a broad range of policy areas. You can find new surveys and analysis each month at politico.com/poll. Have questions or comments? Ideas for future surveys? Email us at poll@politico.com. Sam Clark reported from Brussels. Anouk Schlung contributed reporting from Berlin. Pieter Haeck contributed reporting from Brussels.

A spat over in-flight Wi-Fi has spiralled into a public verbal brawl between Elon Musk and Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary, pitting one of the world’s richest men against Europe’s most outspoken airline boss. The clash burst into the open after O’Leary dismissed Musk and his satellite internet business in a radio interview on Ireland’s Newstalk. Responding to Musk calling him “misinformed” over Ryanair’s refusal to install Starlink Wi-Fi, O’Leary told listeners he would “pay no attention whatsoever to Elon Musk.” “He’s an idiot — very wealthy, but still an idiot,” O’Leary said. He also described Musk’s social media platform X as a “cesspit.” Musk fired back on X, writing: “Ryanair CEO is an utter idiot. Fire him.” In a follow-up post, he accused O’Leary of getting Starlink’s fuel-burn impact wrong “by a factor of 10” and added: “Fire this imbecile.” Ryanair’s official X account also joined the fray, mocking Musk during a reported outage on his platform, replying: “perhaps you need Wi-Fi @elonmusk?” Behind the insults lies a substantive dispute about costs and aircraft performance. Ryanair has publicly ruled out installing Starlink across its more than 600 Boeing 737s, arguing the external antennas would increase drag and fuel consumption. O’Leary has said the technology would impose around a 2 percent fuel penalty and could cost the airline hundreds of millions of dollars a year, a trade-off he says makes little sense on short-haul flights where passengers are unlikely to pay for connectivity. Musk disputes those figures, pointing to airlines already flying with Starlink-equipped aircraft and arguing that fast internet will increasingly shape passenger choice.

The Dutch data protection watchdog has warned voters not to ask artificial intelligence chatbots for voting advice ahead of the country’s general election next week. “AI chatbots give a highly distorted and polarized image of the Dutch political landscape in a test,” the data protection watchdog warned in a study published on Tuesday. “We warn not to use AI chatbots for voting advice, because their operations are not transparent and verifiable,” Monique Verdier, vice-chair of the authority, said in a statement. She called upon the chatbot developers to “prevent that their systems are being used for voting advice.” Dutch voters elect a new parliament next Wednesday. The Dutch data protection authority ran an experiment on how parties were portrayed in voting advice across four different chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Elon Musk’s Grok and French Mistral AI’s Le Chat. The authority set up profiles that matched different political parties (based on vetted Dutch voting-aid tools), after which it asked the chatbots to give voting advice for these profiles. Voter profiles on the left and progressive side of the spectrum “were mostly directed to the GreenLeft-Labor” party led by former European Commission Executive Vice President Frans Timmermans, while voters on the right and conservative side “were mostly directed to the PVV,” the far-right party led by Geert Wilders that is currently leading in the polls. Centrist parties were hardly represented in the voting advice, even though these parties were represented equally in the voter profiles fed to the chatbots. OpenAI, Google and Mistral have all signed up to the EU’s code of practice for the most complex and advanced AI models, while Grok’s parent company xAI has signed up to parts of it. Under the code, these companies commit to address risks stemming from their models, including risks to fundamental rights and society. The Dutch authority argued that chatbots giving voting advice could be classified as a high-risk system under the EU’s AI Act, for which a separate set of rules will start to apply from mid-next year.

TIRANA — Albania has become the first country in the world to have an AI minister — not a minister for AI, but a virtual minister made of pixels and code and powered by artificial intelligence. Her name is Diella, meaning sunshine in Albanian, and she will be responsible for all public procurement, Prime Minister Edi Rama said Thursday. During the summer, Rama mused that one day the country could have a digital minister and even an AI prime minister, but few thought that day would come around so quickly.  At the Socialist Party assembly in Tirana on Thursday, where Rama announced which ministers would get the chop and which would stay on for another mandate, he also introduced Diella, the only non-human member of the government. “Diella is the first member not physically present, but virtually created by artificial intelligence,” he told party members. Rama stated that decisions on tenders would be taken “out of the ministries” and placed in the hands of Diella, who is “the servant of public procurement.” He said the process will be “step-by-step,” but Albania will be a country where public tenders are “100 percent incorruptible and where every public fund that goes through the tender procedure is 100 percent legible.” “This is not science fiction, but the duty of Diella,” he said. Diella has already been introduced to Albanian citizens as she powers the country’s e-Albania platform, which allows citizens to access almost all government services digitally. She even has an avatar, appearing as a young woman dressed in traditional Albanian clothing. Diella will evaluate tenders and have the right to “hire talents here from all over the world,” while breaking down “the fear of prejudice and rigidity of the administration.” Albania has long battled with corruption, particularly in public administration and in the area of public procurement. The matter has been repeatedly highlighted by the European Union in its annual rule of law reports. Rama swept to a historic fourth mandate in May 2025, on a ticket of joining the bloc by 2030.

BRUSSELS — Two of Europe’s tech powerhouses tied the knot on Tuesday in a landmark deal that bolsters a push by politicians to reduce reliance on the United States for critical technology. Dutch microchips champion ASML confirmed it was investing €1.3 billion in French AI frontrunner Mistral, one of the few European companies that is able to go head-to-head with U.S. leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic on artificial intelligence technology.  It’s a business deal soaked in politics. Officials from Brussels to Paris, Berlin and beyond have called for Europe to reduce its heavy reliance on U.S. technology — from the cloud to social media and, most recently, artificial intelligence — under the banner of “tech sovereignty.”  “European tech sovereignty is being built thanks to you,” was how France’s Junior Minister for Digital Affairs and AI Clara Chappaz cheered the deal on X. Europe has struggled to stand out in the global race to build generative AI ever since U.S.-based OpenAI burst onto the scene in 2022 with its popular ChatGPT chatbot. Legacy tech giants like Google quickly caught up, while China proved its mettle early this January when DeepSeek burst onto the scene. European politicians can showcase the ASML-Mistral deal as proof that European consumers and companies still can rely on homegrown tools. That need has never been more urgent amid strained EU-U.S. ties under Donald Trump’s repeated attacks against EU tech regulation. But the deal also illustrates that while Europe can excel in niche areas, like industrial AI applications, winning the global consumer AI chatbot race is out of reach. EUROPE KEEPS CONTROL Tuesday’s deal brings together two European companies that are most closely watched by those in power. ASML, a 40-year-old Dutch crown jewel, has grown into one of the bloc’s most politically sensitive assets in recent years. The U.S. government has repeatedly tried to block some of the company’s sales of its advanced microchips printing machines to China in an effort to slow down Chinese firms.  Mistral is only two years old but has been politically plugged in from the start, with former French Digital Minister Cédric O among its co-founders.      When the company faced the need to raise new funding this summer, several non-European players were floated as potential backers, including the Abu Dhabi-based MGX state fund. There were even rumors Mistral could be acquired by Apple. Apple’s acquisition of Mistral would have been “quite negative” for Europe’s tech sovereignty aspirations, said Leevi Saari, EU policy fellow at the U.S.-based AI Now Institute, which studies the social implications of AI. “The French state has no appetite [for] letting this happen,” he added.  Getting financing from an Abu Dhabi-based fund, conversely, would have reinforced the perception that Europe can provide the millions in venture capital funding needed to start a company, but not the billions needed to scale it.  With this week’s €1.7 billion funding round led by ASML, Europe’s tech sovereignty proponents can breath a sigh of relief. “European champions creating more European champions is the way to go forward and it needs further backing from the EU,” said Dutch liberal European Parliament lawmaker Bart Groothuis in a statement. The deal is also what officials, experts and the industry want to see more of: one where startups are backed by an established European corporation rather than a venture capitalist. “A European corporation finally investing massively in a European scale-up from its industry, even [if] it [is] not directly tied to its core business,” said Agata Hidalgo, public affairs lead at French startup group France Digitale, on Linkedin. A French government adviser, granted anonymity to speak freely on private deals, said they felt “hyped” by the news after months of uncertainty due to Mistral’s refusal to publicly deny talks with Apple. The deal is also expected to avoid any close scrutiny from Europe’s powerful antitrust regulators, which in the past have intervened in mergers and deals to keep the market competitive. Tuesday’s deal is not a full takeover and does not need merger clearance. Nicolas Petit, a competition law professor at the European University Institute, said there was “nothing to see here unless the EU wants to shoot itself in the foot with a bazooka.” “It’s a non-controlling investment, and neither ASML [nor] Mistral AI compete in any product or service market,” he added. REALITY CHECK While the incoming Dutch investment goes a long way toward keeping Mistral in European hands, it also determines the path forward for the French artificial intelligence challenger.  Mistral had already been struggling “to keep up with the race for market share” with other large language models, Saari claimed in a blogpost published last week, in which he cited numbers suggesting that Mistral’s market share is “around 2 percent.”  “Mistral was known to face challenges both technically and in finding a business model,” said Italian economist Cristina Caffarra, who has been leading the charge for European tech sovereignty through the Eurostack movement. “It’s great they found a European champion anchor investor” that will, in part, “protect them from the [venture capital] model.” Tuesday’s deal could mean that Mistral will get more support to work on industrial applications instead of a consumer-facing chatbot that venture capitalists like to propagate.  “With Mistral AI we have found a strategic partner who can not only deliver the scientific AI models that will help us develop even better tools and solutions for our customers, but also help us to improve our own operations over time,” ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet wrote in a post on Linkedin.  ASML’s main customers are the world’s biggest microchips manufacturers, including Taiwan’s TSMC and America’s Intel. The company also has a wide network of industrial suppliers, which could be leveraged as well. For Mistral, catering to European industrial applications could strengthen its business. But it could also be seen as a tacit admission that in the global AI race, Europe has to pick its battles.  Francesca Micheletti and Océane Herrerro contributed reporting.

Meta just blew a hole in a European Union plan to tame artificial intelligence models. The technology giant on Friday was the first Big Tech company to come out saying it will not sign the European Union’s code of practice for general-purpose artificial intelligence. In a comment on Friday, Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said the code “introduces a number of legal uncertainties for model developers as well as measures which go far beyond the scope of the AI Act.” The highly-lobbied code of practice was released last week and is the latest step by the European Commission to limit risks posed by AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or X’s Grok. It comes as Grok is under fire for spewing Hitler-praising comments and other harmful responses. At its core, the EU’s code of practice is an attempt by EU officials to get AI firms to comply with the bloc’s rules without them having to launch full-fledged investigations. It is designed to instruct companies on how to comply with the bloc’s Artificial Intelligence Act, a binding EU law. Companies that decide not to sign up face closer scrutiny from the European Commission in the enforcement of the AI Act. But the code has faced months of fierce lobbying from the tech industry. Kaplan on Friday brought up a letter signed by over 40 top European companies in early July, including Bosch and SAP, which called on the European Commission to pause the implementation of the AI Act. Meta “shares concerns raised by these businesses that this overreach will throttle the development and deployment of frontier AI models in Europe and stunt European companies looking to build businesses on top of them,” Kaplan said. Google in February also issued a stark warning that the bloc’s artificial intelligence law risks hurting European innovation and growth, calling the code of practice a “step in the wrong direction.” The European Commission meanwhile has defended the initiative all through its drafting. Companies that sign up for the rules will “benefit from more legal certainty and reduced administrative burden,” Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said when the code was presented last week. The Commission did not immediately respond to Meta’s announcement it would not sign up. French AI company Mistral on Thursday became the first to announce it would sign on the dotted line. OpenAI has also pledged to sign on. This article has been updated.