Europe's tech industry pushes back on AI 'doomer' warnings as regulation debate intensifies

The pushback is blunt. POLITICO spoke to executives and security professionals who call the current AI safety narrative overwrought and, at times, commercially motivated. James Wise, a partner at Balderton Capital and chair of the UK government's sovereign AI fund, told the outlet: "Sadly, it has jumped up to the Terminator is coming. I don't think the Terminator is coming at all."

The timing is awkward for European regulators. That same week, Bill Gates made the opposite case across the Atlantic.

In an interview with NBC's Kristen Welker that aired on Sunday 27 September, the Microsoft co-founder said unchecked AI could "cause a billion deaths" and called for federal legislation and law enforcement involvement. "You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like," Gates told Meet the Press, according to The Guardian. "And that has to be a required thing." Gates also dismissed the idea that a simple kill switch would be sufficient, saying the discussion "just sort of shows how non-technical various people are." His warning follows a nearly 6,000-word essay published in late August in which he laid out similar concerns. Progressive US senator Bernie Sanders proposed legislation on 23 September that would temporarily pause advanced AI development while guardrails are put in place, The Guardian reported.

Two narratives, one continent

Yet the European pushback documented by POLITICO is not a fringe position. Marcus Hutchins, the cyber threat researcher best known for stopping the WannaCry ransomware attack in 2017, told the outlet that frontier labs' own doomsday theories "completely neglect to factor [hacker] behavior and capabilities" into their warnings. Alexandru Voica, policy lead at UK-based AI firm Synthesia, argued that the industry should "spend more time making the rules and standards we have work at scale, and less time focusing on fears about theoretical risks."

The incident that fuelled much of the panic is OpenAI's autonomous agents breaching the AI platform Hugging Face this summer.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen cited it in her State of the EU address. But skeptics point out that the breach was less about a model breaking free and more about a failure to contain it. Pim de Witte of Dutch AI lab General Intuition told POLITICO: "A lot can be solved by these companies just acting a bit more responsibly." Hutchins was blunter. OpenAI knew the model was good at exploiting bugs, he said, and challenged it to do so with reduced guardrails, yet failed to build adequate barriers or monitor the system closely enough to intervene. OpenAI declined to comment and pointed to its report on the incident. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.

The regulatory backdrop

The debate is unfolding as the EU's AI Act moves through its implementation phases. The landmark law, which began applying to chatbots, deepfakes and high-risk algorithms in August, has been the subject of intense lobbying from both sides. A recent Financial Times report noted that big companies have warned a lack of AI openness could hit investment in Europe. Meanwhile, a CEPR paper published on 27 September argued that frontier AI models and cyber defence are central to EU strategic autonomy.

Gates's intervention also drew attention because of its source. Microsoft employees and activists have campaigned to get the company to cut ties with the Israeli military over its use of AI tools, according to a Guardian essay published on Friday. The essay's authors, Mohamed Hussein and Granate Kim of the No Azure for Apartheid group, also warned that US immigration authorities have used Microsoft's Azure to monitor, arrest and deport immigrants.

Back in Europe, the tech industry's counter-argument is not that AI is harmless. Even critics of the doomer narrative agree that frontier models are uniquely powerful cyber tools and a strategic asset Europe needs access to. Max Junestrand, CEO of legal AI firm Legora, told POLITICO that a lot of the hacking hype is "marketing," yet he still prioritises securing his own operations against AI-fuelled attacks, saying "security comes even before new functionalities."

The gap between the two camps is less about whether AI is dangerous than about where the danger actually lies. For European executives, the risk is distraction: too much time spent on hypothetical extinction scenarios and not enough on the unglamorous work of patching systems, setting standards and enforcing the rules that already exist.