Mitsotakis: no government ready for AI's speed

Mitsotakis came to San Francisco on Monday night to promote Greece, and the trip was partly a fact-finding mission — he had spent the morning touring Tesla and Sequoia Capital, with plans to head this week to the U.N. General Assembly in New York. He made the economic case first: Greece is paying down its debt at a record pace, its 10-year bond yield sits around 4.3% versus roughly 5% for U.S. Treasuries, and it is set to regain developed market status next year from MSCI. He also pointed to how Greece has spent its money, saying much of the roughly €36 billion it received from the EU's post-COVID recovery fund went into digital infrastructure, including a supercomputer assembled with the help of Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the port town of Lavrio that he said will come online within months.

That pitch — talent, tax changes, visa programs — ran alongside a franker discussion of AI's social effects. Mitsotakis volunteered that Greece is instituting a ban on social media for children under 15 as of this coming January, but suggested it may already be behind the times given the seemingly addictive nature of AI chatbots. He was similarly cautious about classrooms, and on infrastructure he described Greece as an outlier, pointing to Microsoft's data center cluster near Athens and an AWS deal with Greece's largest utility to build the country's biggest data center in a former coal region.

The stakes here likely hinge on whether Athens can pair its economic courtship of tech with credible answers to the questions Mitsotakis himself raised. He suggested some form of "smart regulation" is inevitable and that the U.S. will largely decide what it looks like, while offering Greece as a host for the conversation — bringing technologists together with "the social scientists, the philosophers, the historians." Whether that ambition translates into policy that keeps up with the tools citizens already use appears to be the open question.