Greece's Prime Minister Says Governments Are Fighting Yesterday's Battle on AI
In San Francisco this week, Kyriakos Mitsotakis was unusually blunt: no government is ready for how fast AI will displace jobs, kids growing up with AI companions worry him more than social media bans, and he thinks frontier lab leaders who say they don't fully understand their own models deserve to be taken seriously.
Key points
- Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in San Francisco on Monday that "no government and no society is prepared for the speed" at which AI will displace jobs.
- Greece has run an education pilot with OpenAI aimed at cutting teachers' administrative workload, but Mitsotakis warned that AI must not replace the hard work of learning basic skills.
- Microsoft is building a cluster of data centres near Athens, and AWS recently struck a deal with Greece's largest utility to build the country's biggest data centre in a former coal region.
- Greece will ban social media for children under 15 from January 2026, but Mitsotakis suggested the rule may already be outdated given how compelling AI chatbots have become.
- Mitsotakis sided with frontier AI lab leaders calling for slower development, arguing that if the people building the models admit they don't fully understand them, the world should listen.
Most politicians on a trade mission stick to the script: GDP figures, tax incentives, a firm handshake. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greece's prime minister, did all that in San Francisco on Monday night and then said something refreshingly unusual in front of roughly 250 founders and investors. He admitted he doesn't have answers to some of the biggest questions AI is raising.
The candour matters, because the questions he named are the ones most governments are avoiding in public.
What did he actually say?
Job displacement from AI "is something which is going to happen," Mitsotakis told the crowd, adding that no government is ready for the pace of it. That is a blunter line than most leaders allow themselves on a fundraising trip. Our story on UK graduate data showing coding jobs falling fastest, published 17 September, shows the numbers are already arriving.
He was just as direct on children. Greece is banning social media for under-15s from January, a step several countries are weighing. But Mitsotakis said he worries the rule is already out of date. AI chatbots, he argued, may be as compelling and as habit-forming as any social platform. "What does it mean for our kids to grow up with digital companions or boyfriends or girlfriends?" he asked. No policy announcement followed. That honesty is the point.
On the debate about whether AI research should move more slowly, he came down clearly on the side of caution. If the scientists building these systems say they don't fully understand how their models improve themselves, he said, the rest of us need to listen to them.
What is Greece actually building?
Greece is not just talking. Microsoft is constructing a data centre cluster near Athens. In a separate deal, AWS, Amazon's cloud arm, partnered with Greece's largest utility to put up the country's biggest data centre in a former coal-mining region, where local communities have welcomed the projects rather than resisted them. That reception is notable: as we reported, labour unions are pushing to halt data centre construction until workers receive job protections.
Mitsotakis also pointed to a supercomputer assembled with Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the port town of Lavrio, expected online within months for AI and scientific research. Much of the roughly €36 billion Greece received from the EU's post-COVID recovery fund went into digital infrastructure, including an online portal that lets citizens handle government paperwork without queuing.
The pitch to tech companies was blunt: lower taxes for returning Greeks for up to seven years, reformed stock-option rules, loosened labour laws. With US work visas harder to obtain, he suggested, more founders should consider hiring in Greece.
Should the classroom pilot worry us?
The OpenAI classroom pilot is the detail worth watching most closely. Personalised AI tutors could help students who lack good teaching, but Mitsotakis was careful to say the benefit disappears if AI simply does the homework for them. "Complacency is a human trait," he said.
That tension, between AI as a tool that opens doors and AI as a shortcut that closes minds, is the one no policy anywhere has resolved. Mitsotakis knows it. For a head of state on a sales trip, saying so out loud is the story.
