Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has revived the proposal to distribute company shares to American citizens, while the US Treasury issues a warning about AI risks to national security. Two signals that seem contradictory, but converge on the same goal: keeping control of AI in US hands.
For Europe and Italy, this is the usual story. While Washington decides how to split the pie (shares for citizens, Treasury oversight), Brussels keeps debating ethics and transparency. The concrete risk? Italian SMEs will end up paying lifetime subscriptions for AI tools owned by US giants, never truly owning their data or models. We see it every day in our projects: renting your digital stack means staying hostage to whoever owns it.
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Our position is clear:
We, at Meteora Web, believe Europe must stop playing a supporting role. Altman's proposal is clever, but it serves US interests. The Treasury's 'warning' is a way to justify centralized control. For Italian businesses, there’s only one path: own your infrastructure. Invest in open source, train local talent, build AI models tailored to our economic fabric. A custom e-commerce built with PHP and Laravel that you control is worth more than a lifetime subscription to a platform that holds your data hostage. We can’t afford another digital divide on geopolitical grounds.
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Entrepreneur, developer, SME: start today exploring open-source AI models like Llama or Mistral. Don’t wait for Brussels to decide for you. We, in Sicily, have been doing this for years: we moved projects onto self-owned stacks because our clients’ revenue matters more than compliments. If Europe doesn’t build its own AI, it will suffer it. And the price will be paid by our businesses.
