This Guardian comment piece argues that the artificial intelligence industry's rapid, largely unregulated expansion risks disastrous outcomes, from environmental damage and financial collapse to authoritarian surveillance and misuse by bad actors. Figures as varied as Bill Gates and Bernie Sanders, alongside AI firm Anthropic itself, have called for a slowdown, but the author contends that voluntary industry restraint or international agreement is unrealistic, since every nation and company is incentivised to keep racing rather than risk falling behind rivals.

The piece identifies the European Union as uniquely positioned to force a pause, via its jurisdiction over Dutch firm ASML, the world's sole maker of extreme ultraviolet lithography machines essential to advanced chip production. Each machine costs around $400m and etches patterns at a 13.5-nanometre wavelength; without them, chip fabrication for the industry's planned $7tn of global datacentres by 2030 would stall. The US already imposes export controls on ASML's machines to China, demonstrating the leverage such a choke-point holds, and the author suggests the EU could similarly restrict exports to slow the broader AI race.