US Treasury Secretary criticizes Europe on AI and its economic model

This is a remark that should not please the leaders of the old continent. On the sidelines of a conference at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent mocked Europe's capabilities in artificial intelligence. The moderator asked him: “When we talk about artificial intelligence, we always hear about China, but what is happening with Europe?”

To which Scott Bessent dryly retorted: “Nothing.” (“nothing”, in the language of Shakespeare), provoking laughter from the assembly, made up of students. Before driving the point home: “I can also say it in French: nothing. And in Spanish: nada.”

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The “Mr. Economy” of the Trump administration clearly recognized, citing the French start-up Mistral, that Europe had “a good business” in the field of AI. But it could not even pretend to compete with the American giants OpenAI and Anthropic: “Mistral has a valuation of around $30 billion. OpenAI and Anthropic will likely go public with a valuation of $2 trillion. We have never seen something like this created in the past,” said Scott Bessent.

“How is this possible?”

A problem of dimension, but also of state of mind, for the American Secretary of the Treasury, who points the finger at European companies that are “very educated, but risk averse”. Scott Bessent cites as an example the reflections of his colleagues from the Old Continent during the G20 Finance, which was held at the end of August in North Carolina. “The first thing they ask is: ‘How to regulate?’,” scoffed Scott Bessent, for whom it is “inconceivable” that Europe has “no major digital company, while we Americans have Microsoft, Amazon, Google... China has Alibaba, Tencent...”

“How is this possible?” asks Scott Bessent. He highlights the role played by the standards issued by the European Union: “Imagine, in the United States, if we had an additional layer of regulation…”. Before supposedly expressing the dismay of European entrepreneurs: "When I receive European business leaders in my office, they tell me: 'With you, we obtained a meeting in five days. To have a meeting with Brussels, we have to wait three months.'"

More broadly, the model of “European-style social democracies” has failed according to Scott Bessent. For him, the majority of European states “find themselves in a spiral” where “they widen their deficit, therefore increase taxes, then lose growth, and increase taxes again…”. A spiral in which America would have found itself if Kamala Harris had become president, believes President Trump's right-hand man.