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

Kyriakos Mitsotakis came to San Francisco to sell Greece, but he spent part of the night doing something rarer for a head of government: admitting how much he doesn’t know about AI. Speaking before about 250 founders, investors and operators at an Endeavor Greece event, he said the people making policy are still trying to catch up with the questions raised by the technology.

The economic pitch was straightforward. Mitsotakis said Greece is paying down its debt quickly, borrows more cheaply than the U.S., and is set to regain developed market status next year from MSCI. He also pointed to the country’s recent use of about €36 billion from the EU’s post-COVID recovery fund, much of which he said went into digital infrastructure. That includes an online government portal and a supercomputer in Lavrio, built with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, that he said should come online within months for AI and scientific research.

He has also been trying to make Greece easier for tech workers and founders. Mitsotakis cited changes to stock-option taxation, looser labor laws, and lower taxes for returning Greeks for up to seven years. He also said Greece is working through visa programs, though processing speed still needs work. And he made the case that the country should be more attractive to companies looking for talent, especially as U.S. work visas get harder to obtain.

The most interesting part of the conversation came when the subject turned from startup policy to the social mess around AI. Greece plans to ban social media for children under 15 in January, but Mitsotakis worried that chatbots may already have moved the problem on. He talked about digital companions, about AI in classrooms, about students using chatbots to skip homework, and about a job market that will be reshaped faster than governments can handle. He also backed a slowdown in frontier-model development if the people building the systems are themselves unsure what those systems are doing.

Greece, for now, is welcoming the physical side of the boom. Mitsotakis said the country has not seen major backlash to data centers, even as opposition grows elsewhere over electricity and water use. Microsoft is building a cluster near Athens, and AWS has announced a deal with Greece’s largest utility for what he called the country’s biggest data center in a former coal region. That’s the real tension here: Greece wants the money, the talent and the infrastructure, while its leader is openly admitting the social consequences are still a moving target.