Then there’s Silicon Valley, which itself has a culture that’s out of step with much of the American and European populace — and that has shaped the rest of America’s posture on tech. That culture has long been guided by a libertarian ethos and unwavering faith in technological advancement, not the forces that might inhibit it. “Despite the central role played by public intervention in developing hypermedia, the Californian ideologues preach an anti-statist gospel of hi-tech libertarianism: a bizarre mishmash of hippie anarchism and economic liberalism beefed up with lots of technological determinism,” two media theorists wrote in a seminal essay, The Californian Ideology, for Whole Earth Catalog in the mid-90s.
One of the most popular concepts flowing through Bay Area circles today is the idea of accelerationism. This philosophy includes different strains of thought: all the way from believing (and hoping) that unregulated AI development will lead to a techno-utopia where the machines solve disease to believing (and hoping) that AI will destroy democracy and usher in a world where a vanishingly small number of tech overlords rule the world. These different outlooks contributed to vastly different regulatory cultures around technology in the U.S. and EU through the 20th and 21st centuries. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, a comprehensive privacy law implemented in 2018, enshrines a right to privacy that doesn’t exist in the U.S. — and restricts tech companies’ ability to collect data and monetize it, which has had massive ramifications for tech companies’ ability to grow in Europe.
“There’s a lot of hubris, a lot of arrogance, and [Europe] really has this mindset that they need to be the world’s regulator, but they do it before the technology is actually developed,” said Michael Jackson, an American tech investor who lives and works in Paris. That’s compared to the U.S., where according to him, the government steps in with more targeted regulation once it understands the needs of the marketplace.
AI threw these differences into starker relief than ever. AI presented greater challenges to privacy and more opportunities for surveillance, and the consequences are harder to predict than almost any other innovation that had come before it, with the possible exception of the internet itself — a nightmare for the risk-averse.
Europe has taken a notably more muscular regulatory approach. The Artificial Intelligence Act — which entered into force in the EU on August 1st, 2024, is Europe’s most comprehensive attempt at reining in AI companies that are not acting in the best interest of the public. Largely, the legislation is about harm reduction. It creates categories of risk for AI applications — from “minimal” to “unacceptable” risk (the latter applications are banned) — and forces most AI companies to be more transparent about how they work.
At the same time, after some halting efforts to regulate AI during the Joe Biden administration, the U.S. under President Donald Trump has thrown regulation to the side. In July, the Trump administration released the AI Action Plan, a series of policy preferences that pledged to “remove red tape and onerous regulation” of AI development. As the EU regulates more, America is doing so less. And as the gap has widened, so has the number of founders in each place.