Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is back in the news: every American family will get a $300 stake in the wealth generated by AI. Reported by the Financial Times, the promise sounds generous — but it's a political move, not a real distribution of power. Meanwhile, OpenAI raises billions, and European governments watch from the sidelines.
Why it matters — This isn't about $300. It's about who owns the infrastructure, the data, the models. The US is using AI as a geopolitical lever: citizens become symbolic shareholders while control stays with a few Big Tech players. Europe? Once again, late to the game. Italian SMEs — the real backbone of our economy — already depend on AWS, Google, and OpenAI for basic tools. If AI-generated value is distributed only in the US, European companies will face a net cost: paying licenses, APIs, subscriptions, with zero return. And Southern Italy, where we at Meteora Web operate, risks falling even further behind. This isn't about fairness — it's about economic survival.
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Our position
We, at Meteora Web, call it political marketing. $300 a head sounds nice, but it distracts from the real problem: Europe doesn't own its stack. No proprietary foundational models, no truly competitive sovereign clouds, no industrial AI strategy. While the EU spends energy on regulation (EU AI Act), the US invests and occupies the market. Our position is clear: owning your stack beats renting it. We don't accept crumbs. A company building its AI on third-party APIs, without data control, is voluntarily putting itself in perpetual rent. The digital divide is also geographic: SMEs in Southern Italy deserve first-class technology, not handouts from overseas.
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What to do — For Italian entrepreneurs: start investing in internal skills. You don't need a 100-billion-parameter model. You need to understand how AI can improve your processes without becoming dependent on a US vendor. For developers: contribute to European open-source projects. For policymakers: stop regulating only. We need tax incentives for building proprietary software and data centers in Italy. If we don't act now, in five years we'll be paying for AI like we pay for cloud today — monthly, never owning the house.
