Last Friday, Sweden allocated $46m per year to its national AI strategy. That's a typical Series A. For one startup.
The direction is right: don't compete with the US and China on foundation models; instead, become the best at applying them. But across Europe, governments keep publishing ambitious AI strategies that read well and change nothing.
We're four founders, building companies in Sweden across mobility, healthcare, enterprise AI and AI deployment. We love Europe and we want it to win. But too many of the most talented people we know have moved to San Francisco in recent years. They left because the return on their work is higher there, and because that's where the talent density is greatest.
The question we keep coming back to: does this strategy create a country where the best builders want to stay? Partly yes. Mostly no.
Sweden still produces more tech unicorns per capita than almost any country on earth. The talent pipeline works. The question is how long it holds without structural support.
We've never felt greater urgency. AI is the biggest opportunity of our lifetimes, but also the greatest threat for those who fall behind.
Invest in application, not proprietary models
Sweden's AI strategy says the country shouldn't compete on foundation models, then dedicates an entire section to building Swedish language models. But the global AI labs invest hundreds of billions in frontier models that already speak excellent Swedish.
Spending tens of millions on a national language model is like building a Swedish search engine in 2005. Anthropic alone spends more on compute in a week than Sweden's entire national language model budget. We're entering a bicycle in a Formula 1 race.
Last year, Sweden's AI commission proposed an "AI for everyone" reform inspired by the home computer reform of the 1990s, a tax incentive that put a computer in nearly every Swedish household.
That generation built Spotify, Mojang, Klarna and a tech ecosystem that shouldn't be possible in a country of 10 million. It was the boldest proposal in the roadmap, but the strategy let it die. The private sector has started filling the gap, but it takes government-scale commitment to reach everyone.
Talent is the real engine
Sweden has never won by being the biggest. We've won by being the smartest at applying technology. That requires the right people, with the right conditions.
Every student and public sector employee needs access to the best AI tools today, not 2030. Give them real problems to solve, not just theory. Make AI a mandatory part of teacher training. That's how you create the next generation of builders. But we also need to keep the ones we've already shaped. Anyone building something valuable should be able to share in the upside at home, through tax-efficient equity regardless of company size and stage.
We recruit international top talent to our companies. Again and again we hear the same thing: "Sweden sounds amazing, but I have a family. I need housing, school, childcare quickly." Then they say no.
Introduce an AI visa with a two-week response time. Fix tax incentives for foreign talent so they compete with US terms. Make sure a key hire can get a national ID number, housing, a school place and childcare without waiting months. These aren't big reforms. They're basic respect for people's time.
Every European country has its version of this problem — governments talking about attracting talent while making it painful to actually move there.
The governance model is the bottleneck
Sweden has 340 government agencies, 21 regions and 290 municipalities, each making independent decisions. A strength in normal times — but a bottleneck during major technological shifts. Every EU member state has its own version of this fragmentation. The AI Act creates a shared regulatory floor but does nothing to speed up implementation at the national level.
The strategy's "AI workshop" is supposed to be fully operational by 2030. Four years is an eternity in AI. Introduce automatic approval with hard deadlines. If an agency hasn't responded in three months, the answer is yes.
Give every government agency an explicit mandate to promote innovation, written into its core instructions. Today, a regulatory body can interpret its mission as purely to control, not to enable. It's not ill will, it's what the instructions say. We've all dealt with agencies that lacked the mandate to be helpful, even when the will was there.
Get Europe ready
We love Europe and want this continent to have its best era ahead. Demographics demand it. Healthcare, education and economic growth demand it.
We're not asking for subsidies. We're asking for governments that move at the speed of the companies they're trying to support. Strategies that don't change reality for the people they're meant to serve are just documents. Every month of delay is a founder who chooses San Francisco instead.
