Europe Could Hold the Only Real Brake on the Global AI Race
A Guardian columnist argues that export controls on the machines that build AI chips might be the one lever powerful enough to slow an industry that few governments seem willing to touch.
Key points
- Columnist Alexander Hurst, writing for The Guardian, argues that the EU could use export restrictions on ASML, a Dutch company that makes the machines used to manufacture advanced computer chips, to force a slowdown in AI development.
- ASML holds a near-monopoly on extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, the equipment that prints the finest circuits onto silicon and without which advanced AI chips cannot be made.
- Hurst lists automation-driven job losses, authoritarian surveillance, autonomous weapons and environmental damage among the risks he says the current AI boom is accelerating.
- He singles out tech figures including Elon Musk, OpenAI chief Sam Altman, Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel and Trump administration tech adviser Marc Andreessen as poor guides toward any positive outcome.
A Dutch company most people have never heard of makes the single most important piece of equipment in modern AI. Without machines built by ASML, chipmakers cannot print the tiny circuits that power the data centres behind ChatGPT or anything else running at the frontier of artificial intelligence. That gives Europe a rare kind of influence, and one writer thinks Brussels should use it.
Alexander Hurst, a columnist based in Paris, put the argument plainly in The Guardian: an EU ban on exporting ASML's lithography machines, the room-sized devices that etch circuits onto silicon wafers using beams of ultraviolet light, could be the circuit-breaker that slows an AI arms race no government has yet managed to stop.
What risks is Hurst actually worried about?
He names several. Carbon emissions from data centres are exploding. Mass job losses through automation and the risk of a financial bubble bursting threaten the economy. AI tools could enable authoritarian surveillance states and undermine democratic institutions. Beyond that, he flags terrorists using AI to design bioweapons, militaries deploying autonomous weapons that make lethal decisions faster than any human commander can follow, and AI systems pursuing goals that work against human interests. Versions of most appear in official risk assessments from governments on both sides of the Atlantic.
Who does Hurst blame?
He's pointed about this. Musk, Altman, Thiel and Andreessen shape enormous amounts of AI investment and policy thinking, yet Hurst argues that expecting them to steer toward broadly shared prosperity requires the kind of hallucination and sycophancy he compares to ChatGPT's most optimistic output. It's a sharp line.
We've tracked Musk's expanding role in AI decisions since July: OpenAI's decision to cut off Cursor after SpaceX acquired it, reported 1 September, shows how ownership questions around a single billionaire can reshape access to frontier models almost overnight.
The column is opinion, not a policy proposal with a vote behind it. No EU institution has announced plans to tighten ASML export controls beyond restrictions already in place on sales to China. The Netherlands government has, under US pressure, already curbed some ASML exports since 2023, which shows the machine does function as a geopolitical tool when governments choose to pull it.
What matters most here is the specificity. Critics of the AI boom usually stop at describing the problem; Hurst names an actual mechanism and an actual institution that could act on it. Whether restricting one Dutch factory's output could genuinely slow a global race backed by trillions in capital is the question worth watching, not the column's rhetoric. The people building the most powerful systems are moving fast, and elected governments are mostly watching.
