On June 3, 2026, Donald Trump signed a new executive order on artificial intelligence — two weeks after scrapping the previous one. The text promises to “promote American AI” with no brakes. No safety board, no mandatory transparency, no alignment with international standards. Just raw acceleration: tax incentives for big tech and an explicit push to dominate before China or Europe get there.
The fact is simple: the US is choosing an unregulated race. What about Europe?
While Trump hits the gas, Brussels keeps polishing regulations. The EU AI Act is important, but it alone doesn’t build a data center, train an open-source model, or give an Italian SME the tools to compete with OpenAI or Google. The gap isn’t just regulatory — it’s industrial.
Why does this matter? Because the Italian SMEs we work with every day — from Sciacca to Milan — risk becoming passive consumers of foreign-made technology. An American (or Chinese) AI decides how you optimize processes, write marketing copy, manage inventory. If you don’t own the infrastructure, you pay a lifelong rental fee. Exactly like those SaaS platforms that hold your data hostage. We’ve always said it: owning your stack beats renting it. Now it applies at a continental scale.
Our position is clear:
Trump’s order is no surprise. It’s the logical outcome of a strategy that treats AI as a geopolitical lever. Europe has three options: be a market, be a tech subcontractor, or seriously invest in digital sovereignty. Today it’s picking the first — and that’s a trap. Security in Italian SMEs is already systematically undervalued: now add dependency on opaque models built elsewhere. We don’t just need rules — we need real funding for infrastructure, training, and a European open-source ecosystem. Otherwise, in ten years we’ll be commenting on another executive order, with even less of a voice.
What to do, concretely? Developers, e-commerce managers, and digital consultants in Italy must stop waiting for someone else to solve this. Choose open stacks (Laravel, Linux, open-weight models) when possible. Demand transparency from AI vendors. And push trade associations to ask not just for regulation but for public investment in shared, accessible compute and data. The digital divide is also geographic: Southern Italy can’t be the periphery of the tech periphery. Start thinking today as if digital autonomy is the only option — because it is.
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