‘We’re already fighting yesterday’s battle’: Greece’s prime minister gets candid about AI

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis visited San Francisco to both advocate for investment in Greece and to gather insight into developments in U.S. tech hubs. In a discussion hosted by Endeavor Greece, he highlighted Greece’s economic recovery, including rapid debt reduction and relatively low borrowing costs, and promoted recent reforms aimed at making the country more attractive to startups and returning expatriates. He also described the Bay Area leg of his trip as a form of fact-finding, after visiting companies such as Tesla and Sequoia Capital. Mitsotakis outlined specific investments and policy shifts intended to bolster Greece’s digital economy. He said about €36 billion from the EU’s post-COVID recovery fund funded digital projects, including an online portal to streamline government services and a new HPE-built supercomputer in Lavrio that he expects to power AI and scientific work. The government has also adjusted stock-option taxation, loosened labor laws, expanded visa programs, and offered lower taxes for returning Greeks for up to seven years. On AI, Mitsotakis took a notably candid tone, acknowledging substantial uncertainty and saying no government is fully prepared for the speed of change AI could bring. He noted Greece will ban social media for children under 15 starting in January and flagged concerns about children forming relationships with AI “companions.” He described classroom pilots with OpenAI aimed at reducing teachers’ administrative burdens and exploring personalized tutoring, while warning that AI should not supplant fundamental learning and that students are already using chatbots to do homework. Mitsotakis also addressed infrastructure and local attitudes toward data centers, saying Greece has not experienced the same backlash seen elsewhere and pointing to Microsoft and AWS projects near Athens and in a former coal region. On governance, he said some form of “smart regulation” is inevitable and that the U.S. will largely shape the shape of those rules; he sympathized with calls from frontier AI labs for caution given uncertainties about how models evolve. Overall, he portrayed Greece as eager to host parts of the global AI conversation while admitting governments are scrambling to keep up with technological change.