Europe Isn't Behind.

HumanX co-founder & CEO Stefan Weitz has been asked whether Europe is behind in AI "probably 200 times". He opened HumanX Amsterdam by explaining why it's the wrong question.

"Behind" assumes a race. Nobody is running one.

Around 3,000 people from 79 countries were in the room at RAI Amsterdam. Over the day, The Prism main stage kept returning to the same idea. Europe's position is stronger than the debate suggests, and the real question is what it does with that position.

Nobody is upstream of anybody

Weitz's evidence was the supply chain. Mistral's €3 billion Series D, which he described as the largest equity round ever raised by a European tech company, runs on Nvidia chips. Those chips are made on ASML machines. ASML, 90 minutes from the venue in Veldhoven, makes every EUV lithography machine in the world.

Europe may trail on frontier models and capital. But, as he put it, "you can't be ahead of your own supplier."

His better question for European operators: what do you have that would take someone else a decade to build? Forty years of regulated credit decisions. Process data that exists nowhere online. Depth that capital cannot compress.

On regulation, he pointed to aviation. It is the most regulated industry on the planet, and it is trusted 11 million times a day.

"AI without governance is simply a toy."

Cheap AI means a security rebuild

Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora told Forbes' Iain Martin that falling AI costs will force enterprises to rebuild vulnerable infrastructure within three to five years. The same capability that helps defenders find vulnerabilities is reaching attackers just as quickly.

"The bad actors have to be right once. The good guys have to be right every time."

His answer is speed. The industry average to detect and respond to a breach is three to four days. Palo Alto's internal target is under one minute. That is hard to reach when most enterprises run 40 to 70 separate security vendors.

Training robots on gameplay

Pim de Witte, founder of General Intuition, made the case to Techleap's Constantijn van Oranje that video games, not web text, hold the data needed for AI that acts in the physical world. The company raised $320 million in June. It draws on Medal, which captures around two billion gameplay clips a year.

Instead of predicting the next word, its models predict the next action. De Witte turned down acquisition offers from several AI labs. The company remains incorporated in the Netherlands, with most of its research team based across Europe.

"Not all data is made equal, and a lot of it is about diversity."

Legal AI is growing the market

Legora announced $200 million in ARR on the day founder Max Junestrand took the stage with Benchmark's Chetan Puttagunta, moderated by Bloomberg's Tom Mackenzie. The Stockholm company went from $1 million to $100 million in 18 months, then doubled again in six.

Junestrand's argument is that legal services are a trillion-dollar market, yet legal software accounts for only about 4% of it. Much legal work simply goes undone at current prices. One client priced a manual contract review at $44 million. Legora completed it in a week.

"The demand for legal services is almost infinite."

The bottom line

These were four very different conversations with one consistent message. Europe's advantage lies in depth, trust and a willingness to put a name to a decision.

Weitz closed with a simple ask for the days ahead: find a person two steps ahead of you.