Greece's PM on AI: 'We're already fighting yesterday's battle'

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis used a stop in San Francisco this week to pitch Greece to the tech industry — and to admit that he has no answers to many of the questions AI is raising for governments.

Speaking Monday night to roughly 250 founders, investors and operators in the city's Financial District, he described his Bay Area visit as partly a fact-finding mission.

The economic case

Mitsotakis, who called the visit "a homecoming," led with the economy. Greece is paying down debt at a record pace and now borrows more cheaply than the United States, he said — a comparison flattered by lower eurozone rates, but striking.

Much of the roughly €36 billion Greece received from the EU's post-COVID recovery fund went into digital infrastructure, he said, including an online portal for government paperwork and a supercomputer built with Hewlett Packard Enterprise in Lavrio, expected online within months to power AI and research.

A ban that may already be outdated

The tone changed when talk turned to AI's effects on society. Greece will ban social media for children under 15 from January, but Mitsotakis suggested the measure may already be behind the times given how addictive AI chatbots are. "Sometimes I feel that we're already fighting yesterday's battle," he said. "What does it mean for our kids to grow up with digital companions or boyfriends or girlfriends?"

He was equally careful about classrooms. Greece has run an education pilot with OpenAI to cut teachers' administrative work, and he sees promise in personalized AI tutors — provided they do not replace "the hard work of learning the basic skills."

Data centers, jobs and 'smart regulation'

On infrastructure, Mitsotakis described Greece as an outlier: while data-center projects draw growing opposition elsewhere over electricity and water use, at home there has been "no significant reaction." Microsoft is building a cluster near Athens, and AWS signed a deal for the country's biggest data center in a former coal region.

He did not pretend to have answers: job displacement "is something which is going to happen," he said, "and no government and no society is prepared for the speed with which it will happen." On slowing AI development, he sided with frontier-lab leaders calling for it: "If the people who are building the models are telling us, 'We're not really sure exactly what's happening with these models,' we need to listen to them."