Greek PM admits he has no clear answers on AI's risks

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis visited San Francisco this week to pitch investors and founders on Greece, but he also did something unusual for a head of state on a trade mission: he told roughly 250 founders, investors, and operators at an event hosted by Endeavor Greece that he doesn’t have answers to many of the AI questions leaders elsewhere are debating more privately.

The trip doubled as a fact-finding mission — Mitsotakis toured Tesla and Sequoia Capital that morning — and as a pitch to get tech companies to set up in Greece, which is set to regain developed-market status from index provider MSCI next year. He pointed to Greece’s economic turnaround: the country is paying down debt at a record pace and, he said, now borrows more cheaply than the United States, with its 10-year bond yield around 4.3% versus roughly 5% for U.S. Treasuries — a striking reversal for a country whose yields topped 40% during its 2012 debt crisis. He credited roughly €36 billion in EU post-COVID recovery funds, much of it spent on digital infrastructure, including a new supercomputer being assembled with Hewlett Packard Enterprise in Lavrio that he said will come online within months to power AI and scientific research. He also cited policy changes such as new stock-option taxation, loosened labor laws, and lower taxes for up to seven years for returning Greeks.

The tone shifted when the conversation turned to AI’s societal effects. Greece is banning social media for under-15s starting this coming January, but Mitsotakis suggested even that step may already be outdated given how addictive AI chatbots have become. “Sometimes I feel that we’re already fighting yesterday’s battle,” he said, questioning what it means for children to grow up with AI companions. He was similarly cautious about AI tutors in classrooms, noting Greece has run an education pilot with OpenAI to cut teachers’ administrative work, but warning that students are already using chatbots to do homework.

On infrastructure, Mitsotakis said Greece has faced little opposition to the data centers Microsoft is building near Athens and the one AWS recently agreed to build with the country’s largest utility in a former coal region. He said job displacement from AI is inevitable and that no government is ready for how fast it will arrive, and he sided with frontier AI lab leaders who have called for slowing development, saying that if the people building the models say they aren’t sure how they work, “we need to listen to them.” Some form of “smart regulation” is coming, he added, and the U.S. will largely shape it — though he said Greece would welcome hosting the debate.

Why it matters

Greece’s pitch shows a small economy competing for AI-era investment less on cost than on policy — tax and labor changes, cheap capital, and low local resistance to data centers — even as its prime minister’s candor underscores how unsettled AI’s societal and regulatory questions remain for governments courting that same investment.