Greece's PM tells San Francisco founders no government is ready for AI disruption

A pitch wrapped around an admission

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis came to San Francisco to sell his country as a tech destination, but the most notable part of the evening was how far he drifted from the standard trade-mission script. Speaking to roughly 250 founders, investors and operators at a waterfront event in the city's Financial District on Monday, he said openly that he does not have answers to many of the AI questions leaders elsewhere tend to debate only in private, according to TechCrunch, whose editor interviewed him on stage.

The trip doubled as a fact-finding exercise. According to TechCrunch, Mitsotakis had spent the morning visiting Tesla and Sequoia Capital and was heading on to the UN General Assembly in New York later in the week. A Stanford graduate who called the Bay Area visit "a homecoming," he led with the economic case: Greece is paying down debt at a record pace, borrows more cheaply than the United States, and is set to regain developed-market status from index provider MSCI next year. As TechCrunch points out, the comparison is not entirely apples-to-apples, since interest rates are lower across the eurozone, but the gap is striking all the same: Greece's 10-year bond yield sits around 4.3% versus roughly 5% for US Treasuries, a far cry from the 40%-plus yields of the 2012 debt crisis.

He was just as keen to describe how the money has been spent. Much of the roughly €36 billion Greece received from the EU's post-COVID recovery fund went into digital infrastructure, he said, including a portal that lets citizens handle government paperwork online and a supercomputer built with Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the port town of Lavrio, due to come online within months to support AI and scientific research. Policy has moved as well: stock-option taxation has been reworked, labor laws loosened, and returning Greeks benefit from sharply lower taxes for up to seven years. On the country's expanding visa programs, he admitted the government still has "work to do" on processing speed.

'Yesterday's battle'

When the discussion turned to AI's effects on society, the salesman framing dropped away. Greece is introducing a social media ban for children under 15 from January, a step other countries are weighing or adopting, but Mitsotakis suggested the measure may already be outdated given the addictive quality of AI chatbots. "Sometimes I feel that we're already fighting yesterday's battle," he said, asking what it means for children to grow up with digital companions, boyfriends and girlfriends.

He was similarly cautious about AI in classrooms. Greece has run an education pilot with OpenAI aimed at reducing teachers' administrative workload, and he sees promise in personalized AI tutors, but he argued the benefits depend on AI not replacing "the hard work of learning the basic skills." Students are already using chatbots to do their homework, he warned, adding that "complacency is a human trait."

Data centers without the backlash

On AI infrastructure, Mitsotakis cast Greece as an outlier. While data center projects face growing opposition elsewhere over their electricity and water consumption, he said there has been no significant reaction in Greece. Microsoft is building a cluster of data centers near Athens, and AWS recently announced a deal with Greece's largest utility to build the country's biggest data center in a former coal region, where he said such projects are welcomed.

Slowdowns, job losses and who writes the rules

He did not pretend to have a plan for what comes next. Job displacement, he said, "is something which is going to happen," and "no government and no society is prepared for the speed with which it will happen."

On the question of whether AI development should slow down, he sided with frontier-lab leaders who have been calling for exactly that. If the people building the models say they are not really sure what is happening inside them, especially regarding how the models improve themselves, "we need to listen to them," he argued.

Some form of "smart regulation" is inevitable, he observed, and the United States will largely determine its shape. Greece, he added, would happily host the conversation. Humanity, he said, has created a form of intelligence that is quickly exceeding the capacity of what he called the most advanced organ evolution has ever produced, and the response requires bringing technologists together with social scientists, philosophers and historians.

Why it matters

Heads of state rarely say "I don't know" on the record, least of all in front of investors they are trying to win over. That candor is itself a signal: a children's social media ban that takes effect in January already feels dated to the politician implementing it, overtaken by concern over AI companions. His positions also carry practical weight. His alignment with frontier-lab calls for a slowdown adds a national leader's voice to that camp, and his acknowledgment that Greece's regulatory environment will largely be decided in Washington is a frank statement of how much leverage smaller states actually hold. Where they can compete is on infrastructure, tax and talent, which is precisely where Greece is positioning itself, from the Lavrio supercomputer to AWS data centers to tax breaks designed to reverse the brain drain of the debt-crisis years. Offering to host the debate in the city of Socrates is, at minimum, well-branded.