Greece's PM Warns AI Policy Is 'Fighting Yesterday's Battle'

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told an audience of roughly 250 founders, investors, and operators in San Francisco on Monday night that governments worldwide — including his own — do not have answers to the AI questions most leaders are still debating privately.

Speaking at an event hosted by Endeavor Greece, the local arm of a global nonprofit supporting entrepreneurs in emerging and growth markets, Mitsotakis broke from the usual trade-mission script. Heads of state typically arrive with polished pitches. He arrived with open questions about AI companions, chatbots in classrooms, and job displacement — and said so on stage.

The stakes are considerable for Greece. The country is set to regain developed market status next year from MSCI, the influential index provider, and Mitsotakis is courting tech companies, data center operators, and the Greek diaspora to consolidate an economic turnaround that follows a debt crisis during which the country's 10-year bond yields topped 40% in 2012.

What did Mitsotakis say about AI and children?

Greece is instituting a ban on social media for children under 15 starting this coming January, a step many other countries are weighing or adopting. Mitsotakis suggested the measure may already be outdated given the seemingly addictive nature of AI chatbots.

"Sometimes I feel that we're already fighting yesterday's battle," he said. "What does it mean for our kids to grow up with digital companions or boyfriends or girlfriends?"

The comment is notable because it comes from a leader who is simultaneously rolling out the restriction. Rather than defending the ban as sufficient, he framed it as a policy already trailing the technology it targets.

How does he view AI in classrooms?

Mitsotakis was similarly cautious about education. Greece has run an education pilot with OpenAI aimed at reducing teachers' administrative work, and he sees promise in personalized AI tutors.

But he said the benefits depend on AI not replacing "the hard work of learning the basic skills." He warned that students are already using chatbots to do their homework, adding: "complacency is a human trait."

His position sits between the enthusiasts who want AI tutors deployed broadly and skeptics who want the technology out of schools entirely. The pilot with OpenAI continues, but Mitsotakis offered no finished framework for how Greece will draw the line between assistance and substitution.

What about job displacement?

Mitsotakis did not pretend to have answers on employment, either. He said job displacement from AI "is something which is going to happen," and that "no government and no society is prepared for the speed with which it will happen."

That candor contrasts with most political messaging on AI, which tends to promise retraining programs or downplay the timeline. Mitsotakis offered neither.

On the debate over whether AI development should slow down, he sided with the leaders of the frontier labs who have been calling for exactly that. "If the people who are building the models are telling us, 'We're not really sure exactly what's happening with these models,'" especially in how they improve themselves, he said, "we need to listen to them."

Some form of "smart regulation" is inevitable, he observed, and the U.S. will largely decide what it looks like.

Why was he in San Francisco?

Mitsotakis described his Bay Area trip as partly a fact-finding mission. He spent the morning touring Tesla and Sequoia Capital, among other stops, and planned to head this week to the U.N. General Assembly in New York. He earned a master's degree at Stanford and called the visit "a homecoming."

The trip was also meant to build bridges. He pitched anyone in tech who might consider setting up operations in Greece, leaning on the country's expected MSCI upgrade.

"I think it's another indication that the economy is doing well and that Greece is no longer treated as a special case," Mitsotakis said of the reclassification.

Greece is paying down its debt at a record pace, he said, and borrows more cheaply than the United States. "I don't know if I should say this," he told the crowd, smiling. As of the event, Greece's 10-year bond yield sat around 4.3%, versus roughly 5% for U.S. Treasuries. The comparison is not apples-to-apples — interest rates are lower across the eurozone, which accounts for part of the difference — but the gap would have been unimaginable when Greek yields exceeded 40% in 2012.

What has Greece built with EU recovery money?

Mitsotakis said much of the roughly €36 billion Greece received from the EU's post-COVID recovery fund went into digital infrastructure. The list includes:

• An online portal that lets Greeks handle government paperwork without waiting in line
• A new supercomputer assembled with the help of Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the port town of Lavrio, which he said will come online within months to power AI and scientific research in Greece
• A cluster of data centers Microsoft is building near Athens
• A deal AWS recently announced with Greece's largest utility to build the country's biggest data center in a former coal region

On data centers specifically, Mitsotakis described Greece as an outlier. Despite growing opposition to data centers across the globe because of the amounts of electricity and water they require, he said that "we have not had any significant reaction" in Greece. In the former coal region, he said, the projects are welcomed.

He also listed policy changes aimed at tech companies and returning talent. Greece has changed how stock options are taxed, loosened labor laws, and offers returning Greeks far lower taxes for up to seven years. The country's public universities, which he said long embraced a "radical leftist approach" and looked down on corporations, now spin out startups.

Asked how the government measures the success of its growing array of visa programs, Mitsotakis acknowledged it "still [has] work to do" on processing speed.

His larger goal is to win back the talent Greece lost during its debt crisis, when many younger citizens left because they had no other options. He also sees an opening: with American work visas getting harder to obtain, he suggested more founders should consider hiring in Greece.

Why does Mitsotakis want the AI debate held in Athens?

Mitsotakis closed on a philosophical note. Humanity has created "a form of intelligence that is very quickly exceeding the capacity of the most advanced organ that evolution has ever created," he said, raising the question of what it means to be human.

Bringing together technologists with "the social scientists, the philosophers, the historians," he said, "I cannot think of a better place to really have these discussions" than Greece. Athens is where Socrates questioned his fellow citizens in the agora about what makes a good life and a just society.

With "smart regulation" inevitable and the U.S. likely to shape it, Mitsotakis's pitch positions Greece as a venue — if not a rule-setter — for a debate that Silicon Valley has not settled itself.